Nova Scotia company developing C.difficile antibiotic
A Nova Scotia pharmaceutical development company is $3,271,000 closer to creating a tasteless antibiotic to treat one of the most troublesome hospital-spread infectious diseases. Appili Therapeutics Inc. announced Wednesday it has finished its first round of seed funding and launched their medical chemistry lab.
The company has secured $1,764,000 from private investors and received $500,000 from Innovacorp, the public venture capital organization. The remainder came from federal and provincial sources including the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.
The company’s immediate focus is the tasteless antibiotic it is creating to treat Clostridium difficile infection (commonly referred to as C. difficile).
“It’s not always easy getting children to do a task,” said Halifax MP Andy Fillmore Fillmore, who was on hand for the announcement. “This holds true when getting kids to take medicine—particularly (an) unpleasant, bitter-tasting antibiotic.” That’s where Appili comes in.
CEO Kevin Sullivan said the company will use the new investment to create a taste-masked, liquid treatment for C. difficile. The spore-forming bacterial infection is causing a big problem for people with weakened immune systems, including youth and seniors.
C. difficile is treated with a bitter-tasting antibiotic, but because it doesn’t taste good, people will often stop taking the antibiotic leading to the spread of the infection.
Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted Appili orphan drug status giving them access to the market. Sullivan expects this will give them at least seven years access to the U.S. market and blocking others from developing a competing product. Sullivan’s goal is to bring the drug to market quickly and he is shooting to have it ready by 2017.
C. difficile is commonly contracted in the hospital. The infection affects over 500,000 Canadians and Americans, and leads to more than 30,000 deaths each year.
Another issue Appili hopes to tackle with this new funding is the emerging failure of antibiotics. “Antibiotics like penicillin were once called wonder drugs,” said Sullivan. “They allowed us to keep our hospitals safe places for the sick and allow us to improve the outcomes of complex surgical procedures.” But over time, the bacteria that antibiotics target are becoming resistant to what Sullivan calls the “post-antibiotic era.”
Appili’s mission is to create new therapies that can overcome this barrier, one they hope to achieve through more research and laboratory testing. The company has 10 employees, including five new medicinal chemists. Sullivan expects to open up more positions as his company grows. He will be calling on tech-savvy people, chemists, biologists, even financial whizzes.
“We think of ourselves as skating to where the puck is going to be, rather than where the puck is,” Sullivan told the Chronicle Herald. “Moving into the antibiotics space now will give us an advantage over the next four or five years as the environment continues to become more favourable to antibiotics.”