b'Case Study NATURE VS AMRSupporting the next generation of scientific leaders recommended advancing with a spinout and pursuing Innovate UK follow-on funding. During the ICURe stage, Multi-Drug-Resistance bacterial infections pose athe focus was to understand and undertake market serious threat to global health due to increasingvalidation for the product and also map the Intellectual bacterial resistance against currently used antibioticsProperty landscape to ensure a robust pitch to attract and the lack of new classes of antibiotics to combatinvestment. This was achieved, as the team received resistant bacterial pathogens. In 2019, nearly fivestrong interest from multiple stakeholders, including million people lost their lives due to antibioticinvestors. Dr Parmar said,resistance-associated infections and millions more live with poor quality of life due to treatment failures. NBIC offered valuable advice and helped us identify the most appropriate pathway to pursue. The extensive Currently, most antibiotics used or under developmentnetwork available through NBIC facilitated effective for treatment suffer from resistance issues leading tooutreach and connections.treatment failure. Moreover, the development pipeline of innovative antimicrobials is nearly dry. TogetherThe team have now secured follow-on funding from with their research group at the University of Liverpool,Innovate UK to establish a spinout. At present, they Dr Anish Parmar and Dr Ishwar Singh aspire to bringare on the verge of spinning out and actively pursuing new hope to improve and save lives currently lost duefurther funding and collaboration opportunities.to AMR. They aim to achieve this by refreshing the antimicrobial pipeline with innovative molecules.Natural products are usually complex molecules. The team simplify these molecules to develop a library of simpler molecules and use this process to select desirable drug-like qualities to maximise their therapeutic potential, an important aspect of drug development. The team have applied this process to a natural antibiotic, teixobactin, to address its developmental challenges, such as safety and scalability. This has successfully treated MRSA infections in several in vivo preclinical models and the team are now moving this forward in preclinical testing. and hope to treat patients in the clinic within five years.Dr Parmar recently participated in the NBIC-funded SETsquared Biofilms ICURe Sprint, seeking market validation for their technology. The project receivedMechanism of action of antibiotic forming antiparallel -sheets positive feedback during the options roundabout(blue) bound to bacterial Lipid II (yellow and pink). Image courtesy panel, leading to a successful pitch. The panelof Professor Markus Weingarth.Early Career, University ofReader in Antimicrobial Drug Liverpool, researcher andDiscovery and Development PDRA with 10 years expertiseat the Departments of in synthetic peptides andPharmacology and Chemistry, 8 years with antimicrobialUniversity of Liverpool. He has 24 teixobactins. Received theyears of experience in Medicinal sole award Excellency inChemistry, focusing on drug research for the work donedesign and development and on Teixobactin. antimicrobials.Dr Anish Parmar Dr Ishwar Singh50'