Phico awarded £1.03M Wellcome grant for MRSA treatment

Grant

Phico Therapeutics Ltd has been granted a Wellcome Trust Strategic Translational Award of £1.03 million to pay for Phase I and II trials of its lead candidate SASPject PT1.2. PT1.2 tackles methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) by killing bacteria harboured in the nose before they can cause an infection.

PT1.2 is based on a new class of antibacterial proteins called SASPs which bind to bacterial DNA resulting in rapid speed of kill. Phico envisages developing a fast-acting, easily applicable nasal gel that would combat both hospital MRSA infection and hospital and community MRSA transmission and drug-resistance.  

Phico Therapeutics CEO and founder, Heather Fairhead, says there is a clear need for such a product.  “Whilst hospitals have introduced stricter cleaning regimes, the twin problems of transmission and drug-resistance remain.”

“We demonstrated last year in several studies, including some carried out in conjunction with the UK’s Health Protection Agency, that PT1.2 is rapidly bactericidal against more than 200 clinical S. aureus and MRSA isolates, spanning the known MRSA types in Europe and the US.”

In the speed of kill assay, SASP caused a 99.9 per cent drop in viability within 2 minutes against MRSA cultures.

The award will enable Cambridge-based Phico to conduct phase I and II clinical trials, with results expected by the third quarter of 2009 and third quarter of 2010 respectively.