A New Paradigm

Quorum Innovations (“QI”) is building a biopharmaceutical company driving one of the next important eras in medicine by engaging the body’s immune system to treat a broad range of pathogens in biofilm form (i.e., surface-attached).  Founded on the vision that extracts from the human microbiome can yield microbiome pharmaceutical candidates and human biofilm immunotherapeutics, QI research and development is expected to help solve the problem of antibiotic resistance.

Developing anti-biofilm therapeutics is significant because many human pathogens preferentially grow as biofilms.  Biofilms are ubiquitous in nature: they are living, microbial ecosystems, attaching to essentially any animate or inanimate surface.  By forming biofilms on the human body, such as on skin, bone, lungs or sinuses, pathogens can survive even the most aggressive antibiotic treatment.  Moreover, pathogenic biofilms are extremely common.  They cause most chronic infections, including chronic sinusitis, chronic bronchitis, non-healing wounds, nearly all hospital-acquired infections, and pneumonias in patients with cystic fibrosis.  However, current FDA-approved antibiotics have been developed based on planktonic drug discovery platforms, which do not reflect the true pathophysiology occurring in biofilm disease patients.

Unlike current antibiotics, QI’s innovative anti-biofilm immunotherapeutics have been developed on in-house proprietary biofilm testing platforms, where they have been found to be effective against many of the world’s most serious biofilm pathogens. Powerful anti-biofilm effects have been demonstrated against multi-drug resistant organisms such as methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and fluoroquinolone resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (FQ PSA).  Furthermore, such potencies have been observed with minimal to no associated toxicities and excellent therapeutic indices tested with several human cell lines and human tissue biopsies.

Importantly, the unique nature of QI’s small molecular therapeutics includes beneficial immunomodulation and promotion of molecular human innate immune defense with intrinsic anti-inflammatory effects.  Through QI’s innovative discovery platform founded on microbial biofilm selectivity, we have designed therapeutics safety considerations into the initial compound development phase.  This takes into initial critical consideration active compound synergy with the human microbiomial-metabolic axis, and how it subsequently helps restore human microbiomial/biofilm/inflammatory homeostasis.

As a result of QI’s innovative discovery and development process, our bioprospected active compounds have safety margins often typically exceeding those in a traditional synthetic compound library.  Ultimately, this will enable our therapeutics to be used across broad indications, populations (pediatric to geriatric) and tissues.  Further increasing therapeutic index, QI compounds are designed for local administration to the biofilm-affected body site.  Such anatomically targeted delivery minimizes toxicity, maximizes manufacturing cost efficiencies while minimizing patient risks such as resistant pathogen development sometimes associated with standard anti-microbial (particularly the planktonic model) treatment itself as well as side effects related to drug systemic exposure.

Finally, despite the fact that pathogenic biofilms cause nearly as many deaths annually as cancer, and that global unmet medical needs from resistant pathogens are at a critical all-time high, today’s medical armamentarium remains unprepared to treat any human biofilm-related infection or disease.  There are currently no FDA-approved antibiotics for the treatment of medical biofilms.  For these and other reasons, Quorum Innovations’ broad-spectrum, anti-biofilm, anti-inflammatory therapeutics would be unique, powerful and valuable additions to any pharmaceutical or health therapeutic investment or collaborator portfolio.