The World Health Organization names antimicrobial resistance as one of the most urgent public health threats, but it remains an unattractive target for the pharmaceutical industry due to its weak profitability.
In the face of growing resistance to common antibiotics the world over, North Carolina biotech Kinvard Bio launched on Monday with a mission to develop next-generation drugs that can combat rising “superbugs.”
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the World Health Organization’s top public health concerns globally, claiming nearly 5 million lives per year. If left unchecked, this number could balloon to 10 million by 2050, according to a July 2023 study published in PLoS Medicine. By 2050, AMR is expected to cost the global economy around $100 trillion, as per WHO estimates.
To combat AMR, Kinvard is developing what it calls oxepanoprolinamides (OPPs), a technology coming out of research done by the start-up’s founders at Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. OPPs make up a new and distinct class of lincosamide antibiotics that can strongly and specifically bind to bacterial ribosome.
Preclinical studies done at Harvard point to the potential of OPPs to show potent activity against both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, which themselves are known to trigger severe clinical outcomes, and for which there are urgent unmet needs, according to Monday’s press announcement. Kinvard has already licensed the OPP technology from Harvard, opening up the path toward clinical application.
With its launch on Monday, Kinvard joins the very small group of biopharma players addressing AMR. Despite being a pressing public health problem, AMR remains unattractive to the industry—especially to its biggest players—largely due to a shaky path to profitability.
Few companies remain in this space, and even then, their assets typically don’t sit high on their priority lists. Among these players are Eli Lilly, which in July 2024 partnered with OpenAI to develop novel agents against resistant pathogens, and GSK, which in April that year notched a Phase III win against certain strains of gonorrhea that have grown resistant to existing therapies.
In an interview with BioSpace in July 2024, John Stanford, executive director at Incubate, an organization of life sciences investors, called the situation a “classic example of market failure,” pointing to the “little to no incentive to invest in AMR versus other promising therapeutics.”
Kinvard will first focus on the preclinical optimization of its OPP program, for which it plans to develop both oral and intravenous formulations. The start-up will prioritize “the most challenging acute and chronic” resistant infections, such as bacterial pneumonia, complicated urinary tract infections and nontuberculosis mycobacteria lung disease.
Kinvard’s launch on Monday was backed by the venture investment firm Kineticos Life Sciences, while much of the scientific groundwork done at Harvard was supported by the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator and the Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X). Monday’s press announcement did not specify how much seed funding Kinvard received, though it did reveal that the team received $1.2 million from CARB-X.
