Technologies

Our Technologies

We’ll do whatever it takes to generate new drugs for tuberculosis therapy. These drugs are either chemicals or biologicals, e.g., antibiotics or human antibodies. Traditionally, the discovery of either one of these medicines has required large teams, but recently, dedicated contract research organizations have taken over important parts of the processes. This allows us to concentrate on our core competencies that we have assembled in our company.

Antibodies

Austrianni has unrestricted access to the powerful antibody discovery platform developed by the California company Trianni. This platform features the complete diversity of human antibody variable domains, which undergo natural V(D)J recombination and somatic hypermutation. Using this platform, Austrianni isolates fully human antibody therapeutics for the treatment of tuberculosis, with emphasis on multidrug resistant tuberculosis.

These antibodies may work
in two different ways:

Small Molecules

There are many enzymes that Mycobacterium tuberculosis cannot live without, and several antibiotics exploit this fact. Traditionally, antibiotics were found by testing large collections of microorganisms, or large collections of chemicals, for their ability to interfere with bacterial growth. Or chemical libraries were tested against an isolated target. In either case, only a tiny fraction of the vast chemical space of drug-like structures, estimated to consist of 1063 structures, can be covered.

Today, the three-dimensional structures of many important proven or putative targets have been solved in requisite detail, either by X-ray diffraction or cryo-electron microscopy. This enables the computational screening of large virtual compound libraries. Of course, these libraries are valuable only if the selected compounds can also be synthesized within a reasonable time, so that they can be ‘wet-lab’ tested against the isolated target or in an assay of biological function.

To date, over 500 million compounds have been collected in a virtual library. All compounds of this collection can be chemically synthesized from smaller compounds on demand by a commercial supplier. From this large virtual library, we computationally select over hundred best-fit compounds that are then tested in our biological tests.

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