Icelandic startup baggage €6M EU grant to battle drug-resistant infections

Reykjavik-based Akthelia Pharmaceuticals and the College of Iceland have been awarded a €6m grant by Horizon Europe to fight antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This happens when micro organism, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolve and not reply to medicines, making infections more durable to deal with.

AMR is listed among the many WHO’s most pressing health threats of our time, with the potential to provide rise to the subsequent international pandemic as “pan-drug”-resistant strains emerge. It’s additionally estimated that AMR related infections already contribute to roughly 5 million deaths per year — greater than AIDS/HIV or malaria.

Now, the EU-funded IN-ARMOR challenge, led by Aktelia and the College of Iceland, goals to sort out this problem in collaboration with eight different universities and institutes and 6 corporations throughout Europe.

The challenge’s intention is to develop a brand new sort of drug that may increase the physique’s pure immune response, also called “innate immunity.” It’ll handle infections attributable to micro organism, viruses, and fungi.

IN-ARMOR will faucet into Aktelia’s R&D on innate immunity and antimicrobial peptides – brief protein chains that play a key position within the immune programs of mammals, together with people. The startup‘s work builds on the analysis of the College of Iceland, which is one the corporate’s house owners.

The challenge will develop the brand new drugs utilizing computer-aided drug design and in-silico approaches. It’ll harness nanotechnology to focus on medication to particular areas inside the physique, extending their effectiveness and lowering unwanted side effects.

Upon completion, IN-ARMOR will transfer to scientific validation. The staff hopes that the brand new drug could possibly be used not solely together with different antibiotics, but additionally by itself.

“By concentrating on stimulating the physique’s innate defences towards an infection, we are able to keep away from the usage of conventional antibiotics and develop revolutionary new therapies to sort out multiresistant micro organism. This might save numerous lives the world over,” said Guðmundur Hrafn Guðmundsson, professor on the College of Iceland and CSO at Akthelia.

If profitable, IN-ARMOR would have the potential to save lots of long-term €107 billion in antibiotics growth. Moreover, it might cut back the worldwide illness burden by 97 million DALYs — the years of life misplaced attributable to untimely mortality or the years lived with a incapacity because of a illness.