Erebagen

The rise in antibiotic resistant superbugs and drug-resistant cancers are threatening to have a major impact on our health and ultimately the sustainability of life as we know it. Natural products are now used less often in early stage drug discovery as they are often seen as an expensive drug discovery solution, despite 49% of all used medicines being derived from natural products . Erebagen has developed a new engineering platform which enables us to find compounds locked in bacterial genomes. By using our platform we are not only able to discover completely new scaffolds, we are also able to develop these compounds against a range of clinical targets. This platform is the product of extensive academic research into a wide range of topics in natural product chemistry. From taking a more holistic approach to natural product biosynthesis, we have been able to build a engineering platform that uses bioinformatics, microbiology, synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry to find and develop new chemical entities. 

Our platform is designed to tackle the two major challenges associated with using natural products in modern drug discovery; rediscovery and developability. It is now difficult to find new compounds from microbes as the low hanging fruit have been found. Natural products also have complex 3D scaffolds that are not amenable to synthetic chemistry. This means even when compounds with good bioactivities our found they are often not developed into leads. Our platform uses the machinery that already exists in bacteria to find new molecules and we have shown that the compounds we generate have hit rates that are over 20x better than synthetics in industrial screens. Also as our platform uses genetic engineering, once we find bioactive compounds we can further engineer the microbe and combine this with synthetic chemistry to create derivatives of bioactive compounds to better understand the structure activity relationship. We are still using the biosynthetic machinery that exists in the bacteria which allows us to create derivatives without engaging in a total synthesis of the molecule (which can be highly time consuming).