DEINOVE benefits from the support of the French government, within the framework of the “France Relance” plan, to accelerate the development of new antimicrobials

DEINOVE benefits from the support of the French government, within the framework of the “France Relance” plan, to accelerate the development of new antimicrobials

• DEINOVE’s Boost-ID project has been selected as part of the “France Relance” plan, a recognition of its strategic positioning.
• Boost-ID is an accelerator in the identification of antimicrobials and molecules of natural origin with high added value.
• Boost-ID consists of setting up a high-throughput bacteria screening platform based on breakthrough microfluidic technology.
• It is one of six projects in the strategic health sector selected in the Occitania region.

DEINOVE (Euronext Growth Paris: ALDEI), a French biotech company pioneering the exploration and exploitation of bacterial biodiversity to address the urgent and global challenge of antimicrobial resistance, announces that its Boost-ID project (Bacteria Optimum Output Screening Tool for treating Infectious Diseases) is one of 105 projects selected by the French government, out of nearly 1,000 presented, as part of the call for resilience projects. The grant, which is expected to amount to €500-800K, is intended to support the Boost-ID project, estimated at just over €1M in total, and will enable DEINOVE to set up an industrial plant for sorting bacteria at very high throughput, based on droplet-based microfluidics.
Boost-ID is a continuation of the Deinodrop¹ project granted by the National Research Agency (ANR).

DEINOVE will build a breakthrough technology, at the interface of physics and modern biology.
Boost-ID will accelerate the selective isolation of bacteria with antimicrobial potential from environmental samples and will become the first screening step of DEINOVE. Microfluidics is based on the manipulation of infinitely small volumes (picoliter scale or 10^-12 liter) and at very high throughput
(1 million bacteria per hour). Boost-ID will thus increase the platform’s current performance while reducing its costs. The bacterial strains with the most promising activities, detected in microfluidics, will then go through the automated extraction steps, requiring larger volumes, to be tested on reference panels. The large proportion of metabolites being of a clinical nature too complex for synthetic chemistry, DEINOVE’s fermentation bioproduction capabilities and know-how will then come into play to obtain the critical mass and quality for their preclinical and clinical evaluations.

From picoliter to 20 liters, the Company is strengthening its position as an industrial biotech dedicated to the identification of “gold nuggets” of natural origin, from the 99.9% unexplored microbial dark matter². With a major gain in yield upstream of the process, Boost-ID will accelerate the development of new antimicrobials and molecules of natural origin with high added value.

Alexis Rideau, CEO of DEINOVE comments: “This support by the French government will accelerate the implementation of our microfluidics platform, with the goal of being operational by the end of 2021. Boost-ID will dramatically increase the platform’s current performance, while reducing its costs, particularly for reagents and plastics. Together with our expertise and technological capabilities in synthetic biology, microfluidics is a turning point in DEINOVE’s history as it will enable us to perform low-cost biological tests at unprecedented rates to explore and exploit microbial dark matter.”

ABOUT DEINOVE

DEINOVE is a French biotechnology company pioneering the exploration of a new domain of life, unexplored at 99.9%: the “microbial dark matter”. By revealing the metabolic potential of rare bacteria or still classified as uncultivable, it tackles a global health and economic challenge: antimicrobial resistance. The new therapies discovered and developed by DEINOVE target superbugs (microbes that have become resistant to one or more antimicrobials) that cause life-threatening infections which are now spreading at high speed.

This breakthrough approach gave rise to one of the world’s first specialized micro-biotechnology platforms and a unique collection of nearly 10,000 rare strains and thousands of bacterial extracts. Today, DEINOVE is conducting several development programs, of which its first antibiotic candidate is currently evaluated in a Phase II clinical trial in severe Clostridioides difficile infections, one of the world’s first emergencies. The Company has also developed new bacterial micro-factories that address the other issue in the race against antimicrobial resistance: the industrial production of these rare and low concentrated compounds with often too complex chemical structures to be generated by chemical synthesis.
Located at the heart of the Euromedecine park in Montpellier, DEINOVE has been listed on EURONEXT GROWTH® (ALDEI – code ISIN FR0010879056) since 2010. The Company has over 50 employees and relies on a network of world-class academic, technological, industrial and institutional partners.

CONTACTS

¹Press release December 9, 2019

²Kenneth J. Locey and Jay T. Lennon, Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity, PNAS May 24, 2016 113 (21) 5970-5975

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• PR in English