According to the latest annual report from the global nonprofit partnership CARB-X, at the close of its fifth fiscal year it has provided as much as $361 million to 92 projects seeking solutions to antibiotic resistant bacteria, gathered new partners under its umbrella and continually grown its understanding of the issue.
CARB-X invests in preventatives, diagnostics and therapeutics with potential to help deal with antibiotic resistant bacteria. Originally founded in 2016, it consists of both public and private partners from the U.S. and Europe pushing innovative medical products toward clinical development and regulatory approval. From 2020-2021, this collaboration yielded investments in 25 new projects, along with two successful graduations from the organization’s portfolio. Part of progress is change, though, and CARB-X also made several strategic augmentations of that portfolio in the past year.
“In our fifth year, we augmented our portfolio along many themes, including non-traditional therapeutics, where we can simultaneously drive individual projects towards meaningful products and answer key questions that unlock value more generally for these new modalities,” Dr. Erin Duffy, chief of Research and Development at CARB-X, said.
This past year also saw developers from two additional countries join the organization’s efforts: Italy and Denmark. CARB-X in turn launched the world’s first practical guidance for strategies and activities in support of stewardship and access as companies pursue marketing of new antibacterial products, and advanced understanding of certain aspects of antimicrobial resistance, by improving animal models of infections, providing consistent assessment of critical safety risks and through early evaluation of pre-existing resistance risk for therapeutics and antigenic variability for preventatives.
While the organization has received more than 1,160 applications in its five years, at the end of the latest fiscal year it presided over 60 active projects from 12 countries. These include novel antibiotics, non-traditional therapeutics, vaccines and preventatives, rapid diagnostics and a unique enhancement to an existing antibiotic.
Total, CARB-X has helped nine projects to pass from its portfolio and move closer to market.