Summit Therapeutics receives grant for Gonorrhea drug treatment development

Summit Therapeutics on Tuesday was awarded a grant of up to $4.5m from CARB-X, a public-private partnership devoted to accelerating early antibiotic research and development.

The AIM traded clinical-stage drug discovery and development company said it will use the grant to support its wholly-owned, lead series of new mechanism antibiotic compounds for gonorrhea, which is recognised as an urgent bacterial threat by the US centers for disease control.

The condition has only one treatment currently recommended by the CDC as it has consistently developed resistance to each other class of antibiotics previously endorsed for treatment.

Summit has identified a series of new antibiotic compounds that have shown high potency against a range of gonorrhoea strains, including those that were multi-drug resistant.

Kevin Outterson, executive director of CARB-X, said: "The world urgently needs new antibiotics, like those that Summit is developing, and other life-saving products to protect us from drug-resistant bacteria. The projects in the Powered by CARB-X portfolio are in the early stages of development, but if successful, they offer tremendous potential in the fight against superbugs."

Summit will initially receive $2.0m to part fund a pre-clinical candidate from its lead gonorrhea series, with the remaining $2.5m to be split into two option segments which can be exercised by CARB-X upon the achievement of certain milestones.

I exercised in full the funding could support the development of the selected gonorrhea candidate to the end of a phase 1 clinical trial.

Glyn Edwards, chief executive of Summit, said: "Funding is important to us as we aim to pioneer a new era in antibiotic innovation and allows us to accelerate the development of our first series of new mechanism of action gonorrhea compounds. The award is a testament to the promise of our gonorrhea programme, and the discovery capability of our proprietary genetics-based platform."

As of 1621 BST, Summit Therapeutics’ shares were up 17.14% at 40.00p.