Business Concentrates RESEARCH FUNDING
Roche, Warp Drive form antibiotics pact Big pharma firm will pay up to $87 million for access to novel natural product classes Warp Drive Bio has secured another lucrative partnership for its genome mining drug discovery platform. Roche will pay up to $87 million in preclinical milestones and fees as part of a pact to explore new classes of natural products targeting Gram-negative bacteria.
Warp Drive’s Cambridge, Mass., labs Researchers have long relied on molecules made by soil bacteria as the starting point for antibiotics development. But despite decades of trying, in the lab they can coax bacteria into making only a limited range of compounds. As a result, “we continue to mine in the same field,” says Warp Drive Chief Scientific Officer Alan Rigby. “Even the most current molecules are really rip-offs of what’s out there in terms of chemical backbones and, thus, mechanisms.” Warp Drive is trying to overcome those limitations by mining bacterial genomes for sequences that code for novel mole-
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cules. During the company’s first few years, that meant searching for gene clusters that encode key components of known drugs. The approach allowed the company to unearth novel, built-by-nature analogs of familiar classes of antibiotics. These included β-lactams and aminoglycosides, the latter of which it licensed to Sanofi. With the Roche pact, Warp Drive will now search for novel classes of antibiotics. To do that, Warp Drive scientists use their database of bacterial genomes two ways. One effort involves looking for genomic signatures that suggest a molecule is related to the synthesis of a polyketide, a huge class of compounds whose structures can be translated from their gene sequences. “We can look in the genome for gene clusters that we can predict with pretty high confidence will encode natural products that have not historically been analyzed,” says CEO Laurence Reid. The second effort involves digging for gene clusters where something “looks amiss,” Rigby says. For example, extra copies of a housekeeping gene embedded in a cluster could be a clue to the recipe for a natural product that would overcome a resistance mechanism. The deal gives Roche, which has cut back on internal research of new antibiotics, an option for global rights to certain antibiotic classes that come out of the collaboration. Warp Drive gets to keep any other promising molecules discovered.—LISA JARVIS
The proportion of Norwegian drivers who opted for electric vehicles in September, based on new registrations. This figure, an all-time high, includes both all-electric and plugin hybrid vehicles. Norwegian drivers’ enthusiasm for Tesla cars may be behind the increase—Norway imported more than 2,000 of the California company’s Models S and X the same month. Source: Inside EVs
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C&EN | CEN.ACS.ORG | OCTOBER 23, 2017
Drugmakers, NIH hunt for biomarkers Eleven drug companies are joining forces with the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Cancer Moonshot to expedite the discovery of cancer immunotherapy biomarkers, molecular bar codes that help doctors know how to treat a tumor and gauge how well a person responds to a drug. NIH announced a $160 million, five-year commitment to the new Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT) on Oct. 12. The 11 industry partners will each contribute up to $1 million more a year for five years. “We all agreed that separately we could do a lot, but together we could do it faster,” said NIH Director Francis Collins. PACT will test and validate biomarkers in many cancer immunotherapy trials so that assays can be standardized and data compared between different research groups. Immunotherapy has helped eradicate tumors in some people for whom all other treatments have failed. But it doesn’t work for everyone as expected. The field’s potential also “has yet to be realized” for solid tumors, Collins said. Thomas Hudson, vice president of oncology discovery and early development at AbbVie, said the partnership could help identify people who will respond well to therapies and avoid recruiting those who won’t. In addition to AbbVie, the industry partners include Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceutical, Novartis, and Pfizer. “No company will have all the [immuno-oncology] drugs, and for the best therapies we will need to combine,” Hudson said. Collins suggested the U.S. Food & Drug Administration has an interest in evaluating PACT’s biomarker evidence “as it comes in,” possibly to speed up drug review.—RYAN CROSS
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