A few decades from now, if the country turns out to have a few home-grown antibiotics, those who ventured into drug discovery early and failed would have played an important part. One of these is AstraZeneca, the British multinational that started and closed down a drug discovery centre in Bengaluru. As this centre was shut in 2014, its experienced set of scientists started joining other programmes in the city. Three of them came together to start the company Bugworks in Bengaluru.
The AstraZeneca R&D centre was focussed on tuberculosis, and had a $1 million grant from Wellcome Trust to look at what combination of drugs works best against TB. Although Astra-Zeneca closed down its antibiotics programmes, the ideas they developed in this project emboldened them to start Bugworks, which moved on from TB drugs to tackling infections at a broader level. “I realised that hospital infections are going to get more and more serious,” says Bugworks CEO Anand Anandkumar.
Anandkumar was the founder of another firm called Cellworks, which was the primary partner in the Wellcome Trust programme. Bugworks quickly evolved a platform, from which it developed few possible drug candidates to tackle bacteria that are resistant to a large number of drugs. By April, Bugworks may begin toxicity trials with one of these drug molecules. “It is a fresh approach,” says Anandkumar. “It does not guarantee success, but it guarantees a new look at a serious problem.”
Checking the Vulnerabilty
Around the country, a clutch of startups are finding new ways of tackling antibiotic resistance, a problem that most big companies have given up on. These startups also provide some hope of solving a problem, even if a decade from now, that health experts regard to have assumed serious proportions already.
Bacteria are quickly acquiring resistance to every antibiotic human beings can throw at them. As the death of an American woman who died in September 2016 and hit the headlines last week showed, hospital infections can be fatal no matter what antibiotic we use.
The American woman, who picked up the infection in Delhi, was treated with 26 different antibiotics. But few patients have this luxury in India or elsewhere. “For the vulnerable population,” says Ramanan Laxminarayan, distinguished professor at the Public Health Foundation of India, “it does not matter whether bacteria are resistant to 26 antibiotics. Resistance to just three antibiotics is enough to cause death.” The vulnerable population include the new-born and the old.
Public health experts agree that regulating the use of antibiotics is the first step towards tackling antibiotic resistance. As policy-makers wrestle with regulation, some startups have begun the next step: discovering new antibiotics against drug-resistant bacteria.
Since drug resistance is the main problem, four of these startups — Bugworks and Gangagen in Bengaluru, Vitas Pharma in Hyderabad and Vyome Biosciences in New Delhi — are specifically targeting drug-resistant bacteria.
Drug discovery companies have formidable scientific and business challenges. In India, they have additional challenges to overcome: an unimaginative regulator, lack of funding, and stillmeagre scientific resources. Good ideas get funded at the project level by the government, but it becomes harder and harder as the project increases in sophistication. Barriers become very high once a drug candidate is getting ready to go to clinical trials.
Vitas Pharma, set up in the year 2011, got a `50-lakh Biotech Ignition Grant from the Department of Biotechnology. It got another grant — amount undisclosed – from the Wellcome Trust, and `3 crore from the Indian Angel Network. The company has eight people, two molecules as lead candidates for development, and another molecule at a very early stage, usually called a hit. If everything goes well, Vitas Pharma could get a product to market in five to seven years. If things don’t go well, as is the case in most drug discovery programmes, it…