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Athelas Ltd.

 
• By Chris Morrison

Geneva-based start up Athelas Ltd. aims to develop anti-infective drugs based on new bacterial targets it discovers through its DiVi platform. The company's platform is based on the use of the amoeba as a model organism--by engineering single-gene mutant bacteria and infecting the amoebas with those bacteria, Athelas' scientists aim to identify drug targets that may be important in vivo, but that might not be found via traditional in vitro screening methods.

When Pharmacia Corp.'s (now Pfizer Inc.[See Deal]) linezolid (Zyvox) was launched in 2000, it was the first antibiotic with a novel mechanism of action to hit the market in 35 years. Indeed, the hundreds of antibiotics developed since Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 work through just five mechanisms for stopping bacterial growth. "This demonstrates the limits of the basic Fleming concept in the search for new classes of antibiotics," opines Jean-Pierre Paccaud, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Geneva-based start up Athelas Ltd. The standard practice of assessing which genes are important for the survival of bacteria, he argues, has not yet opened many new doors.

Anti-infectives have traditionally been considered lower risk than other therapeutic areas since, broadly speaking, clinical trials are shorter and end-points simpler: if a drug inhibits a bug on a Petri...

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