Germany-based Evotec is to collaborate with US-based Harvard University to discover and developing novel anti-bacterial agents in the hope of creating a new class of antibiotics.
Frankfurt-listed drug discovery business Evotec will harness the power of its comprehensive drug discovery infrastructure and expertise, using assays, chemical starting points and x-ray crystallographic tools licensed from Harvard.
Researchers at Harvard and Evotec will collaboratively identify small molecule inhibitors of bacterial cell wall synthesis. They will specifically target peptidoglycan biosynthesis (PGB), a pathway that is a critical process in the bacterial cell that acts as a prime target for the design of antibiotics. The commercialisation of the resulting assets will be through Evotec.
Harvard professor Daniel Kahne said: “We are confident this collaboration will put us in a strong position to translate the science and develop a new class of antibiotics against this well conserved target.”
This is not the first time that Evotec has partnered with Harvard. In 2011, Evotec teamed up with the Ivy League school and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute on a diabetes drug initiative. That collaboration proved lucrative for both parties when Johnson & Johnson bought their regenerative diabetes treatment portfolio for $300 million in July 2012.