Phylogica and Cubist team up to evaluate antimicrobial Phylomers

Peptide drug discovery company Phylogica (ASX: PYC) is collaborating with US-based Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CBST) to evaluate several of its antimicrobial Phylomers in models of multidrug-resistant bacterial infections.

Phylogica’s Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Paul Watt, commented, “Through this collaboration, we hope that Phylogica’s antimicrobial Phylomers will support Cubist’s ongoing work to discover and develop new antibiotics to address the growing global health threat of antibiotic resistance. In Phylogica’s own assays, these antimicrobials have shown activity against multiresistant isolates of gram-negative organisms, which are a major cause of deaths from hospital-acquired infections of burn wounds.”

Phylogica’s Phylomer libraries contain over 400 billion unique natural peptides, which have been optimised by evolutionary selection to have stable drug-like structures. They can bind tightly and specifically to disease-associated target proteins, both inside and outside cells.

Earlier this month, Phylogica was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Projects grant for research with the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB). The two parties will develop a single biosensor capable of displaying tens of thousands of synthetic Phylomers in parallel for screening in high throughput.

Phylogica shares were trading 5% higher at $0.021 as of 3.30 pm on Thursday.