Tuberculosis - a deadly disease with a huge global burden

Tuberculosis continues to be the most serious cause of death from a single infectious micro-organism. Drug resistant tuberculosis is a particularly insidious manifestation of this disease for which alternative approaches to conventional therapy are required to facilitate treatment.  Despite heroic efforts to develop new drugs to treat tuberculosis a very small number are currently in late stage development. New strategies that involve consideration of the pharmaceutical properties of old and new drugs are needed to improve efficacy and facilitate approval of next generation combination therapies. Poor solubility and bio-availability of efficacious compounds commonly leads to discontinuation of their development. However, formulation approaches can be employed to improve these properties and alternative routes of administration may further increase their therapeutic effect. 

PAI is reformulating two drugs as a combination therapy that could be effective against multidrug resistant TB

We are collaborating on developing a new therapy for TB. By delivering the drug straight to the site where the organism mostly grows in a convenient and low cost inhaler we intend to produce a therapeutic strategy that lowers the amount of drug needed, can be delivered by users at home, and that may be effective against various forms of tuberculosis including drug resistant forms.

Leveraging the immune system to treat TB

Our second platform is based on standard bioinformatic searches combined with neural nets to search a genome to identify antigenic epitopes, including repeat sequences and T cell epitopes. Here we screen and rank targets, we identify full length sequences and predicted cellular location wherever possible and confirm the specificity of these sequences by evaluating against the genomes of other organisms. Following target ranking we can assist in the design, expression and purification of recombinant target proteins.