You will be well aware that the rapid emergence of antibiotic resistance is a threat on a global scale with the potential to undermine the advances that have been made in medicine over the last 100 years. The potential crisis that the world faces has been compounded both by the innate difficulty in the discovery of new antibiotics and the exit of pharmaceutical companies from antibacterial research for commercial reasons. 

Over the last decade at Evotec we have collaborated with a variety of Biotech and Pharma companies on antibiotic drug discovery and recently we have seen increased interest from our collaborators in this therapeutic area. In the last year we have grown Evotec’s expertise in antibacterial research and leveraged our capabilities in concert with expert academic groups to deliver new options for therapeutic intervention for resistant bacterial infections of urgent and serious medical need.

In this, the fifth issue of our DDup (Drug Discovery Update) we introduce our new capabilities in microbiology that result from the integration of Euprotec into
the Evotec family and also the first internal antibacterial project which is being conducted in collaboration with Professors Dan Kahne and Suzanne Walker at Harvard University to identify inhibitors of peptidoglycan biosynthesis.

Learn more about antibiotics and our collaboration with Harvard including an interview with Professors  Dan Kahne and Suzanne Walker in this Drug Discovery Update #5.