venture kick winner BioVersys collaborates with University of Lille and GlaxoSmith Kline
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The antibiotic resistance of pathogens is a ticking timebomb, one that biochemists Marc Gitzinger and Marcel Tigges want to defuse. Now BioVersys announces a collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to develop a preclinical candidate against tuberculosis (TB), funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Marc Gitzinger and Marcel Tigges are fighting against antibiotic resistance. “By reactivating existing antibiotics to treat multi-drug resistant bacteria, we will help overcome this major unmet medical need and thus help many patients around the world,” explains cofounder and CEO Gitzinger. Molecular “switches” known as transcription factors are very often triggering the initiation of the molecular processes to read or translate the information that lies in the genome of an organism. Scientists in the ETH department of Biosystems Science and Engineering in Basel have been researching these switches for years. In 2008 two young postgraduate students, Gitzinger and Tigges, began speculating as to whether these transcription factors might also play a role in enabling pathogens to resist antibiotics. Their work led to the development of “transcriptional regulator inhibiting compounds,” or TRICs, that disrupt the work of transcription factors that enable resistance. With this Gitzinger and Tigges founded BioVersys, generated CHF 2.5 million in seed money and found a home for their lab in the Technologiepark Basel.It all started with a kick
Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death globally from a bacterial infectious disease. The now announced collaboration will utilize BioVersys’ award-winning innovative TRIC technology that enables the discovery of Transcriptional Regulator Inhibitory Compounds. The project, built upon a very long history of TB research in Lille, will advance molecules that reactivate the efficacy of established TB therapies. The University of Lille consortium comprises leading scientists in TB research and drug discovery from the Institut Pasteur de Lille, Université Lille 2, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). The Wellcome Trust is funding the development activities as part of a pre-existing collaboration with GSK towards finding treatments for diseases largely affecting low-income countries. On the way to success, venture kick played a decisive role as Marc Gitzinger says: “venture kick was the first seed capital we received in the company; without this we would not have been able to get off the ground and get our first results. Saying this really means that BioVersys would probably not exist without venture kick. In addition to the money, the coaching and the contacts gained through venture kick really kick-started our company”.
