Platform Overview

Rib-X℠ develops breakthrough antibiotics which target the bacterial ribosome and are designed to overcome the growing problem of drug resistance in the treatment of life-threatening infections. At the core of Rib-X's integrated approach to novel drug design is the Company's ribosome crystallography platform to target the large (50S) ribosomal subunit of bacteria, for which Company co-founder, Thomas A. Steitz, Ph.D., won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009. Rib-X couples computational design tools with atomic-level insights about ribosomal structure to build novel, small molecule antibiotics with increased target affinity to avoid bacterial resistance and fine-tuned molecular properties to increase spectrum, efficacy and safety. These tools are part of Rib-X's integrated design strategy that associates structure-based design, preparative medicinal chemistry, ribosome biochemistry, molecular biology and pharmacology in a tight-knit fashion, resulting in a highly-efficient and productive drug development engine.

 

As a drug target, the ribosome has been well-validated—most of the marketed classes of antibiotics work by inhibiting its function. Rib-X is the only company with the combined cross-functional experience and knowledge base to exploit the high-resolution X-ray crystal structures of the bacterial ribosome for drug development. By applying its analytic capability to current antibiotic classes, the Company is able to reveal gaps in coverage and rationally design next-generation compounds and novel classes of antibiotics to combat known resistance mechanisms and have broad spectrum activity.

 

Rib-X's unique discovery approach has yielded an industry leading, fully integrated, complementary pipeline to address the broadest scope of bacterial infection. The first two discovery programs focused on building better antibiotics in existing classes—RX-01, which generated the Phase 2 clinical candidate radezolid, focused on oxazolidinones, and RX-02 focused on macrolides. The RX-04 and RX-05 programs target novel loci on the 50S subunit for the generation of novel classes of antibiotics. RX-06 also targets a novel locus on the 50S subunit but is focused on the generation of novel antifungal compounds.