Research & Development

Oxford Drug Design has been awarded a portion of a £3m drug discovery programme fund organised by the Cystic Fibrosis Antimicrobial Resistance (CF AMR) Syndicate. The Collaborative Discovery Programme (CDP) has been set up to support six early-stage novel antimicrobial projects with the aim of accelerating new treatments for people with CF suffering from lung infections, and is funded in full by LifeArc – a self-funded, not-for-profit medical research charity.

Oxford Drug Design, which uses AI methodologies to identify and develop novel therapeutics, has been awarded £466,000 of the fund and aims to identify a new therapy for treating bacterial infections in CF patients. The project is expected to take 18 months and is carried out in collaboration with Liverpool University, UK.

Dr Paula Sommer, head of Research at Cystic Fibrosis Trust, said: “For people with CF, lung infections can cause breathlessness and difficulty breathing. They can also cause major disruptions to day-to-day life, meaning people can miss work or school. Lung infections are hard to treat due to AMR, which is why we’re delighted to see the CF AMR Syndicate support these projects that will develop new antimicrobial treatments for CF.”

Chief scientific officer of Oxford Drug Design, Dr Paul Finn, added: “We are very excited to receive this CF AMR Syndicate Collaborative Drug Discovery Programme award. We will be expanding our antibacterial discovery efforts into this new area of application, which is of high unmet medical need, and advancing the programme with our proprietary computational and generative artificial intelligence (genAI) platform.”

Oxford Drug Design is a drug discovery company based in Oxford, UK.