Archive for April, 2007
eMetagen Awarded SBIR Grant to Develop Antibiotics
The US National Institutes of Health has awarded eMetagen Corporation a one-year, $194,442 grant to develop new antibiotic drugs. The grant will fund the company’s efforts to chemically identify active compounds made by hit clones derived from uncultivated soil bacteria. The hit clones were discovered in antibiotic screens targeting Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a major public health threat and commercially-important drug target.
“The NIH grant validates eMetagen’s metagenomic approach to drug discovery,” says Ena Urbach, eMetagen’s Director of Research and Development and Principal Investigator for the project. “It funds the last set of experiments we need to show the variety of new compounds we can harvest from uncultivated bacteria.”
eMetagen will pursue patent rights for novel structures discovered under the grant and seeks commercial partnerships to develop and license the new antibiotics and other drug products.
eMetagen Corporation is a drug-discovery company producing new pharmaceuticals from uncultivated soil microorganisms. Most pharmaceuticals in current use are derived from environmental microbes, but industrial drug discovery methods have fully exploited the easily cultivable organisms. eMetagen bypasses the need for developing cultivation methods by cloning uncultured microbe DNA into easy-to-grow host bacteria. This approach accesses a broad range of undiscovered biochemical diversity for pharmaceutical and other applications.
eMetagen was founded in 2002 with technologies developed in the laboratories of Robert M. Goodman and collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The company received an earlier NIH grant in 2004 to discover antibiotics active against potential bioweapon bacteria.