By far, one of the greatest public health issues is antimicrobial resistance. Although the future is hard to predict, it is estimated that antibiotic-resistant infections could cause 10 million deaths per year, globally, by 2050.
New resistance mechanisms are emerging at an alarming rate due to our reliance on antibiotics. Global supply chains means antibiotic resistance spreads quickly across the globe too.
Bacteria evolve quickly. Yet, our most basic antibiotics haven't changed for over 50 years. Resistance could also spread without detection, through a mechanism called transient silencing.
Without urgent action, we're headed towards a post-antibiotic era where the existence of superbugs means even common infections and minor injuries can once again kill.
We're putting the engineering back in bioengineering by rethinking our approach to discovery and testing therapeutics for antimicrobial resistance. Xenetics uses logical and modular forms of cellular control through engineered living systems.
Xenetics' therapeutic development pipeline beings with high-throughput phage discovery, to find phages that can precisely infect a bacterial pathogen of choice.
Xenetics leverages next generation sequencing to rapidly characterize our growing biofoundry of bacterial strains and bacteriophages in order to compare their genetic information. This allows us to more efficiently and effectively engineer the precision antimicrobial system.
Xenetics' bioinformatics pipeline selects for the best phage(s) and finds a specific target in the bacterial genome to target through a CRISPR-Cas system or genetically engineered RNA that will be delivered to the target bacteria through the phage.
Send us a message on our contact page to join a community of world class innovators in open source science to tackle antimicrobial resistance.