DELIVER: An Accelerated Antibiotic Screening Platform

Antimicrobial resistance is an increasing threat to our frontline antibiotics, driving the societal demand for new classes of these critical medicines. Fortunately, various incubator programs provide support to guide promising hit compounds from the lab to the clinic. However, the first crucial stage of drug development, identifying these hits, is difficult.

We will help fill this void. Classical hit finding involves systematically and slowly synthesising and screening compounds individually. We will address this by using two emerging technologies: DNA-Encoded Libraries (DECL) and RaPID.

These workflows produce millions of compounds in a single vial, which can be screened against an immobilized protein target to discover high affinity binding compounds, accelerating the discovery process.

DELIVER will identify hit compounds against a panel of underexplored, essential Gram-negative targets, including those involved in Lipid A biosynthesis and outer membrane protein processing pathways.

Hit compounds will be further optimized with guidance from microbiology, biochemistry, crystallography and computational modeling. DECL and RaPID are being widely adopted by the pharmaceutical indsutry. Yet, very few examples exist of their application towards antibiotic research.

DELIVER will use DECL and RaPID to reinvigorate the early stage antibiotic pipeline with the goal of delivering validated hits to antibiotic incubators for development towards much needed new antibiotic classes.