ORCHID project aims to slash development time of tuberculosis drugs
A collaborative project led by a scientist from UK pharma major GSK (LSE: GSK) has identified new compounds for the fight against TB.
The ORCHID (Open Collaborative Model for Tuberculosis Lead
Optimisation), led by David Barros of GSK, has begun a four-year
project to develop new drugs to fight drug-resistant TB and
bring them to the marketplace in an efficient way. The ORCHID
project is co-funded by the European Union.
Dr Barros
said: “When ORCHID started, the last anti-tubercular drug
(Rifampin) to be approved was back in the sixties. Efforts to
discover new drugs for TB have been very fragmented and academic
institutions have been conducting independent research with
little or no links to the pharmaceutical industry.”
This
has not yielded great progress in novel anti-tubercular drugs
but ORCHID is looking to streamline the R&D process by
developing new tools to cut the pathway to trial stage from 10
years to 48 months.
ORCHID is focusing on new drugs
and compounds already in the clinic, and is working on several
chemical series of different stages of the drug discovery
process. This includes identifying new chemical hits from a
screen of the GSK compound collection, optimizing compounds that
have the potential to replace Isoniazid as InhA inhibitors, and
repurposing antibiotic compounds that were previously thought to
be ineffective as treatments for TB.
The team, after
two years of research, has identified an orally-administered
beta-lactam as a potential candidate to combat TB, which is soon
to be the subject of clinical trials.
As part of the
project, new tools to aid drug discovery are also under
development. The École Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, has
devised a tool that enables single cell time-lapse microscopy.
This technique has become a critical resource for understanding
how individual bacteria grow, multiply and die when exposed to
drugs.
Source:
Pharma Letter
