AMR

AMR Action Fund Announces First Investments in Adaptive Phage Therapeutics and Venatorx Pharmaceuticals
Deals mark an important step toward AMR Action Fund’s goal of bringing two to four new antibiotics to market to take on growing threat of drug-resistant bacteria

APRIL 4, 2022, BOSTON, MA –The AMR Action Fund, the world’s largest public-private partnership investing in biotech companies that are developing antibiotics, announced today that it has invested in Adaptive Phage Therapeutics (APT) and Venatorx Pharmaceuticals. The transactions mark the Fund’s first investments and are an important step toward its goals of bringing to market new treatments for priority pathogens identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“From inception, the AMR Action Fund has focused on identifying investments that will yield urgently needed treatments and catalyze long-term innovation to take on the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which now kills more people annually than HIV/AIDS or malaria,” said Bill Burns, Board Chair of the AMR Action Fund. “Welcoming Adaptive Phage Therapeutics and Venatorx Pharmaceuticals as our first portfolio companies demonstrates that we are well on our way to fulfilling this important mission.”…

“Adaptive Phage Therapeutics and Venatorx Pharmaceuticals are poised to change the treatment landscape for drug-resistant infections and deliver significant benefit to patients,” said AMR Action Fund CEO, Henry Skinner. “While this is a major milestone for the Fund, our work is just beginning. We plan to commit over $100 million in capital this year in companies developing clinically differentiated antimicrobials with the potential to treat the most urgent unmet clinical needs, and we will continue investing in promising biotechs in the years ahead to ensure that patients around the world have the treatments they need in the ever-evolving fight against superbugs. Our investments are substantial, but we alone are not enough to take on the global challenge of AMR. It is now imperative that policymakers around the world enact market reforms to support investment in these urgently needed medications.”

APT’s approach leverages an ever-growing library of systematically discovered, selected, catalogued, and curated bacteriophages (phages), naturally occurring viruses that infect and kill bacteria, which collectively provide broad coverage against many of the world’s highest priority antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Phages from APT’s phage bank are matched to treat patients’ infections through a proprietary susceptibility assay, and are being tested on a range of infections, including prosthetic joint infections, bone infections (osteomyelitis), and lung infections. The AMR Action Fund’s investment in APT was executed as an extension to a Series B round led by Deerfield Management Company…

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