It is predicted that a failure to address the problem of antibiotic-resistant pathogens will result in the death of 10 million people annually, costing the economy more than 100 trillion dollars by the year 2050. In high-income countries where antibiotics are heavily used in the community and agriculture, the strong selection pressure and non-completed antibiotic regimens have resulted in the emergence and dominance of Multiple Drug Resistant (MDR) strains2, forcing a shift to more expensive and broad-spectrum antibiotics. The development of new antibiotics will not address the antibiotic resistance crises, rather, it might worsen it. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop novel alternative to antibiotics. 

OUR SOLUTION
We are developing novel therapeutic mAbs against MDR bacteria. Instead of the classical antibiotics, used so far in the clinic, our mAbs will target specifically the secretion system apparatus of the pathogenic bacteria that is essential to bacteria’s virulence. mAbs as anti-bacterial drugs, offer key benefits over conventional antibiotics: i) they do not provide selection pressure feedback to the genome, hence are less likely to induce resistance among bacteria; ii) they should not perturb the nonpathogenic microbiota which lacks the target; iii) the mAbs can be injected as a single-dose regimen, or concomitantly with traditional antibiotics, which could have synergistic bacteria-clearing effects. The mAbs provides two possible MOAs: i) inhibition of the secretion system assembly thus, blocking the injection of virulence factors to the host cells (neutralization); ii) triggering and recruiting additional immune cells that neutralize the pathogen (opsonization).