Background
The World Health Organization has announced antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development today. Up to 50% of infections in G7 countries may be resistant to first-line antibiotics
Patients with Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) have 2-3 times higher mortality and risk of complications (e.g. local progression of disease and sepsis). Failure to address the problem of antibiotic resistance could result in 10 million deaths per year by 2050, surpassing cancer as the primary cause of deaths.
AMR treatments cost additional $10-40k per patient and an extra $23 billion for healthcare systems in Europe and North America alone. Accounting for extra healthcare costs, by 2050 up to $2.9 trillion of GDP could be lost across OECD countries due to AMR, at current resistance rates. It is estimated that the total economic output of antibiotic resistance will cost up to $100 trillion.
Why Phage Therapy?
In the past few years, FDA allows compassionate use of phage therapy; hence awareness is building quickly. As access and attention are growing- clinical trials under way.
Additional advantages:
- Phage Therapy holds the potential to reverse this dangerous trend:
- Natural – Harnessing nature’s own enemy against bacteria
- Smart kinetics – Phages grow with bacteria and disappear in its absence
- Can be manipulated (unlike antibiotics) – Engineered / evolutionary developed
- Efficient against biofilm – Chain reaction of the phages
- Do not harm the microbiome – Highly specific to the target pathogen
Our Innovation
We suggest a state of the art, dynamic and tailored approach for personalized phage therapy.
Our approach includes: Identification of phages from banks and new sources, Isolation using proprietary know-how and Machine Learning predictions. We offer Checkboard analyses for fighting bacteria resistance and Engineering the phages if needed as well as prediction of tailored phages and antibiotics cocktails for treatment.
We recently published our successful first phage therapy in Israel and one of the first ones in the world. The Patient suffered from severe osteomyelitis, and was prone to leg amputation. Following IV treatment with bacteriophages, the patient demonstrated full recovery after 10 days. Follow-up after 7 months has revealed no signs of relapse.
Opportunity
Our Vision: To be the leading international phage provider for therapy
Go-to-market plan: Strategic collaborations with hospitals + co-development agreements, consultancy
Cost per Case: $300K (Adaptive Phage Therapy)
Addressable Markets:
- Clinics and hospitals globally, treating any antibiotic-resistant infection
- Improvement of phage product pipelines
- Agriculture chemical industry
- Veterinary indications, primarily cattle
HUJI-HMC Phage Therapy Institute:
Collaboration of the Hebrew University oh Jerusalem and Hadassah Medical Center to establish an international Phage Therapy Center. Our center holds the potential to be the leading in the field, providing the full infrastructure required for personalized phage therapy: Diagnostic laboratory, manufacturing unit, unit of therapy within the hospital, alongside a bacteriophage research center.
