Sweden-based biotech company Symcel has secured just over €3.5m in Horizon 2020 funding to support the evaluation of improved combination testing of antibiotics against drug-resistant bacteria in sepsis patients.

The project will last for 28 months with a consortium of academic and clinical key opinion leaders from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; Hospital Universitario Ramón y Cajal, Madrid, Spain; Careggi University Hospital, Florence, Italy; Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark; and IHE, Lund, Sweden.

Jesper Ericsson, CEO of Symcel, said: “The spread of multi-resistant bacteria is one the most severe risks globally to human health. The world is on the cusp of a post-antibiotic era where[in] the healthcare community faces certain harmful bacteria that are resistant to all known drugs.

“Consequently, little can be done to treat the critically ill patients concerned. There is a large unmet need for a technology like calScreener™ that measures the metabolism of bacteria. The only way to really be sure an antibiotic is effective in killing bacteria. The prospective clinical validation is a great opportunity for Symcel.”

A recent WHO report titled ‘Antibacterial agents in clinical development – an analysis of the antibacterial clinical development pipeline, including tuberculosis’ confirms a severe lack of new antibiotics under development to combat the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance.

Dr Suzanne Hill, director of the Department of Essential Medicines at WHO, said: “Pharmaceutical companies and researchers must urgently focus on new antibiotics against certain types of severe infections that can kill patients in a matter of days because we have no line of defence.”

SymCel was founded in 2004 by Dr Dan Hallén and Professor Ingemar Wadsö (Kemicentrum, Lund University) and now provides a novel cell-based assay tool for real-time cellular bioenergetics measurements.

Symcel´s screening technology will be validated as a new surrogate method to correctly and rapidly determine which antibiotics really work against multi-resistant bacteria.

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