       Platform OverviewRib-X℠ develops 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 a proprietary understanding of the atomic-level details of 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, to support 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’s key competitive advantage is its focus on the three-dimensional properties of antibiotics. 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 a 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.
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