SNY Sanofi

By Jonathan D. Rockoff 

Sanofi SA has received its first set of drug candidates from its collaboration with a Harvard University scientist and his venture backers that aims to jump-start discovery of new medicines.

The collaboration, a biotech named Warp Drive Bio, said it has delivered a few dozen compounds to Sanofi, and the French drug company hopes to turn them into antibiotics for fighting drug-resistant infections, like flesh-eating bacteria.

An approved antibiotic is still years away. Sanofi researchers must study the diverse array of compounds further and then tweak them before the company starts testing the most promising in humans, perhaps as early as 2018, said Sanofi R&D Chief Elias Zerhouni.

Yet delivery of the compounds marks a milestone for the collaboration, which is trying to find new medicines using cutting-edge technologies.

Dr. Zerhouni has sought to break down the big company's traditional insistence on doing research in-house and partner with top scientists outside the company with novel drug-discovery ideas.

He believed such collaborations would allow Sanofi to take advantage of the myriad recent scientific advances that even a big, well-endowed drug company like Sanofi couldn't stay on top of.

Warp Drive Bio, based in Cambridge, Mass., was the first collaboration signed under Dr. Zerhouni's partnership efforts, which he dubbed the Sunrise Initiative.

Sanofi established the company in 2012 with Harvard University scientist and serial entrepreneur Gregory Verdine along with the venture firms Third Rock Ventures and Greylock Partners.

Warp Drive Bio was endowed with $125 million to pursue Dr. Verdine's idea of sequencing the genomes of bacteria and then mining the data for the genetic signatures of disease-fighting molecules.

Among the compounds the biotech discovered, starting last year, were the few dozen compounds that belong to a class of gram-negative antibiotics known as aminoglycosides, according to Warp Drive Bio CEO Laurence Reid.

Dr. Reid called the discoveries a "validation" of the drug-discovery platform built by Warp Drive Bio. The company is also trying to find some new cancer agents as part of its collaboration with Sanofi, while looking for new antibiotics and other cancer drugs of its own.

"Nobody really has generated antibiotics through this method before. It is truly groundbreaking," Dr. Zerhouni said.

The class of drugs has provided some well-known agents, such as Neomycin, streptomycin and tobramycin, which had worked well, despite some side effects, until the bacteria they were fighting began developing resistance.

"We're hoping we will find molecules that are not only more efficacious but also less toxic," Dr. Zerhouni said.

Such antibiotics would help address the "looming public-health disasters" posed by the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, said Dr. Zerhouni, a former director of the National Institutes of Health.

Write to Jonathan D. Rockoff at Jonathan.Rockoff@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 29, 2016 10:06 ET (15:06 GMT)

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