GAITHERSBURG, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Adaptive Phage Therapeutics (APT), a clinical-stage biotechnology company founded to provide an effective therapeutic response to the global rise of multi-drug resistant (MDR) pathogenic bacteria, today announced that Greg Merril, CEO and co-founder of APT, will present an overview of the company and its phage therapy and technologies to investors at the upcoming 2019 World Antimicrobial Resistance Congress, taking place at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC, from November 7 – 8.
“There is an urgent, global need for action around antimicrobial resistance as underscored by this gathering of leaders in infectious disease from across the globe,” said Greg Merril, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of APT. “Since antimicrobial resistance evolves, our adaptive phage therapy is a promising alternative that offers hope to patients who experience multi-drug resistant infections. We are proud to present our technology to investors interested in participating in the significant market opportunity that a cure to this crisis represents.”
Presenting to prospective funders and partners through the Pitch and Partner track of the meeting, Merril will discuss “Advancing Personalized Phage Therapy from Niche to Broad Market Scale,” on Thursday, November 7, at 12:25 pm. In its fifth year, the Congress attracts more than 600 attendees from 40 countries and features more than 200 speakers. It is the only commercially focused antimicrobial resistance conference globally.
In 2017, APT acquired the world-wide exclusive commercial rights to PhageBank™ and related technologies from the U.S. Biological Defense Research Directorate of the U.S. Naval Medical Research Center. Phages are viruses that exclusively kill targeted bacteria – including bacteria that have become resistant to all known antibiotic drugs. PhageBank is a broad-spectrum collection of phages that can be rapidly matched, on a patient-specific basis, to a targeted pathogen. APT is advancing the technology through innovation in bioinformatics, high throughput phage-bacteria matching and phage purification methods – resulting in an approach providing a precision-matched therapy instantly upon identification of a drug-resistant pathogen.
In response to urgent requests from physicians caring for patients with severe infections due to multi-drug resistant pathogens, APT’s PhageBank therapy has been provided to 20 patients under compassionate use. The results of phage therapy for the first 13 of these cases that were infected with one or more MDR bacterial species were published in the July, 2019, issue of the Journal of Intensive and Critical Care Medicine. The article is titled “A Case Series of Emergency Investigational New Drug Applications for Bacteriophages Treating Recalcitrant Multi-drug Resistant Bacterial Infections: Confirmed Safety and a Signal of Efficacy.”
About Adaptive Phage Therapeutics
Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, Inc. (APT) is a clinical-stage company founded to provide an effective therapeutic response to the global rise of multi-drug resistant (MDR) pathogenic bacteria. APT’s core asset is a large and continually expanding phage library (PhageBankTM) deployed with a companion diagnostic to achieve rapid response and cost-effective therapy for otherwise recalcitrant bacterial infections. The technology was developed by the biodefense program of U.S. Department of Defense. APT acquired the world-wide exclusive commercial rights in 2017. Under the FDA emergency Investigational New Drug (eIND) allowance, PhageBank therapy has been used to treat 20 critically ill patients in which standard-of-care antibiotics have failed. For more information, visit http://www.aphage.com.