Deinobiotics project receives €1.35 million for developing novel antibiotic, antifungal compounds

Deinove (Paris: ALDEI), the world's leading specialist in Deinococcus bacteria for biofuels, green chemistry and antibiotics, today announced that its Deinobiotics project is to receive a total of €1.35 million in grants and loans.

                  “We are now at a dead end regarding a number of serious infections. Developing new antibiotics is essential.”

The Deinobiotics project is accredited by the Eurobiomed cluster as part of the 9^th call for proposals by the French government's competitiveness clusters programme, funded by the Interministerial Fund (FUI). The project consortium comprises Deinove (as the project leader), the Nîmes-based biotech company Nosopharm (a specialist in antibiotic screening), the CPBS (a joint CNRS-University of Montpellier 1 lab for pathogenic agent studies) and the Institute for Structural Genomics (CNRS Marseilles).

The funding will be distributed as follows: Deinove will receive € 0.7 million in grants and reimbursable loans from Oseo (the French state innovation agency), the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Council and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF); the FUI will grant € 0.11 million to Nosopharm, € 0.2 million for the IGS and € 0.34 million to the CPBS. Deinove will own a worldwide, exclusive licence to all the intellectual property rights generated in the Deinobiotics project. The company intends to subsequently leverage these rights through exclusive licensing to a pharmaceutical company.

Health authorities are now confronted with a major antibiotics crisis: the number of novel antibiotic compounds being discovered is falling rapidly, whereas (in contrast) bacterial resistance to existing compounds is spreading at an alarming rate. Professor Vincent Jarlier, Head of the Bacteriology Department at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris) comments: "We are now at a dead end regarding a number of serious infections. Developing new antibiotics is essential."

The Deinobiotics project will explore the potential of Deinove's Deinococcus bacterial culture collection for the discovery, development and production of novel antibiotic and antifungal compounds (the project is focused on compounds active against multi-resistant, Gram-negative, pathogenic bacteria). Deinococcus sp. and other rare bacteria constitute a large, untapped source of new compounds. In general, bacteria are among the most prolific and productive sources of antibiotics in the living world and Deinove's bacteria exhibit a huge potential for the discovery of novel antibiotic structures and therapeutic compounds.