Roche, Warp Bio Make $387M Research and Development Pact
The Swiss major is paying up to $387m to get access to potential natural antibiotics that have not been analyzed previously, ‘owing to historical technology limitations.’
Under the deal, Warp Drive will use its Genome Mining Platform to investigate potential antibiotics for drug-resistant, Gram-negative bacteria. The tech platform gives accesses to natural compounds found in soil that haven’t been analyzed before. It will evaluate over one hundred novel classes of previously undiscovered potential antibiotics.
Warp Drive will receive up to $87 million through an upfront payment, option fees and preclinical milestones. Those payments cover the work Warp Drive will do, with Roche’s input on strategy and prioritization, to get development candidates ready for its partner to take forward. Beyond that, Roche is on the hook for up to $300 million in clinical, regulatory and sales milestones.
The small Cambridge biotech’s answer is to go back to the soil armed with modern technologies. The approach to drug discovery pairs a bacterial genome database with bioinformatics tools to identify genes that code for the synthesis of novel natural products. Warp Drive extracts these genes and analyzes natural products they express, before tweaking the
resulting potential antibiotics with chemical technologies to create drug candidates.“We are committed to bringing urgently needed novel antibiotic medicines to patients, and we are delighted to be collaborating with Roche in that goal,” said Laurence Reid, chief executive officer of Warp Drive Bio, in a statement. “Antimicrobial resistance is an extraordinary threat to global human health, and Warp Drive’s unique platform allows us to access a vast reservoir of uncharacterized natural products from which to identify novel antibiotics.”
“The work with Roche is really focused on discovering truly novel classes of antibiotics,” Reids said. He went on to say that the company’s tech platform “includes a genomic database of sequences of bacteria that live in the soil.” Using bioinformatics, Warp Drive can “search in sequences for signatures of genes that encode the biosynthetic machinery for novel compounds. We hunt for clusters that we predict will encode novel compounds.”
The new deal is notable for its focus on novel, natural classes of antibiotics that hit drug-resistant, Gram-negative pathogens. Warp Drive has worked on antibiotics with Sanofi, but its earlier forays into the field aimed to find new drugs in existing classes. The Roche deal goes a step further by hunting for novel classes of natural antibiotics, something no researcher has found in decades.
