A fund designed to support University of Oxford inventors in proof of concept and prototyping work has reached its first close and made its first investment in a new class of antibiotics discovered in a natural product library at Oxford’s Faculty of Chemistry.
The Oxford Invention Fund— managed by the University’s technology transfer company, Isis Innovation—has received donations since it opened last June..
Professor Mark Moloney, whose group mined natural product libraries to identify the next generation antibiotics, said the early stage funding provided by the Oxford Invention Fund would be used to determine compounds most likely to be clinically effective drugs. “The discovery of new antibiotics has become critically important because of the emergence of bacteria resistant to current drugs. The urgency of the task is underlined by the recent E. coli outbreak in Germany in June 2011.”
“This project will test the antibacterial activity of new chemicals we have designed and synthesized, to build up enough data to gain interest from a commercial partner such as a biotech or pharmaceutical company to take the work further.”
Release Date: August 9, 2011
Source: University of Oxford
Filed Under: Drug Discovery
