We are collaborating with a number of Russian companies and research institutions to harness and apply a significant body of expertise and technology breakthroughs related to bacteriocins, antimicrobial peptides produced by different bacteria to attack and defend themselves against other types of bacteria. Bacteriocins work in a distinctively different manner than most current antibiotics and have been optimized as antibacterial agents through billions of years of bacterial evolution. These naturally-occurring compounds could potentially offer a new treatment modality to combat the rapidly rising incidence of multidrug-resistant bacterial infections, which now represents a significant threat to the integrity of medical care in many Western countries. While the number of new antibiotics launched each year and the number of new classes of antibiotics discovered continue to decrease, the number and virulence of multiple drug-resistant strains of bacteria in the hospital environment is increasing at a rapid and dangerous rate. Efforts to produce new traditional antibiotics in the face of the growing crisis of multidrug resistance are hampered by long development times, high costs and shorter life cycles for antibiotics brought on by the growing prevalence of drug resistance. This exploding medical problem represents an opportunity best addressed by companies with novel therapeutic approaches and cost-effective methods of drug development.

Bacteriocins offer a number of potential advantages over traditional antibiotics. Whereas most antibiotics are broad-spectrum, each bacteriocin is distinct in its range of antibacterial effects. Some only target a few species, while others can kill a wide range of species. This allows selection of bacteriocins that are active against a certain pathogen but not against normal microflora of humans or animals. The inhibitory concentration of a bacteriocin optimized for a particular pathogen is comparable or superior to those of common antibiotics. Most important, bacteriocins show effectiveness against antibiotic-resistant pathogens without regard to their typical pattern of antibiotic resistance. In addition, it is known that the level of resistance to bacteriocins is lower than to antibiotics and the development of resistance to a specific bacteriocin provokes little to no bacterial cross-resistance in other strains. Bacteriocins appear to be non-toxic to humans and do not accumulate either long-term or systemically in treated subjects. While bacteriocins and their antimicrobial properties have been known for a long time, traditional applications of bacteriocins have been focused in agriculture to promote food preservation and to combat food-borne illnesses. No systematic effort has been marshaled to develop them for human therapeutic use.

While scientists have long considered the possibility of using bacteriocins to treat human disease, the field has generated little practical interest due to the inherent difficulties of efficiently producing and purifying sufficient quantities of bacteriocins for therapeutic purposes. However, Russian scientists are working on breakthroughs both in the production of bacteriocins and their purification that will enable large scale, economic production of pharmaceutical compounds based on bacteriocins.