1 March 2019 - - US-based antibacterial and antiviral drug research and development company VenatoRx Pharmaceuticals, Inc has received USD 1.9m in first-year funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health for a grant entitled, "Establishing a Gram-Negative Permeation Rule Set Leveraging a Unique Small Molecule Library," the company said.

VenatoRx has the potential to receive funding of up to USD 7.4m over five years if all project milestones are met.

VenatoRx's collaborators include leading academicians and scientists from Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering at Cornell University; Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Gfree Bio, LLC; and Centro de Química-Física Molecular at the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

The objective of this R01 grant is to provide tools that can facilitate therapeutic discovery for Gram-negative bacterial pathogens, including carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii and/or MDR Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

This initiative will also support VenatoRx's discovery programs targeting novel antibacterial agents.

The project is supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01AI136805.

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

VenatoRx is a private pharmaceutical company that is focused on the discovery and development of novel anti-infectives to treat multi-drug-resistant bacterial infections and hard-to-treat viral infections.

The company's lead product, VNRX-5133, is an injectable broad-spectrum beta-lactamase inhibitor that directly inhibits all four Ambler classes of beta-lactamases, including the emerging carbapenemases KPC and NDM-1.

In addition, VenatoRx has a broad pipeline of preclinical programmes, including a broad-spectrum orally bioavailable BLI, a novel class of Penicillin-Binding Protein inhibitors that are impervious to beta-lactamase-driven resistance, and novel antiviral agents.