Flightpath Licenses the First Antibiotic that Selectively Kills Lyme Disease Spirochetes

BERKELEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Flightpath Biosciences, Inc, a biotechnology company advancing microbiome-sparing therapeutics and diagnostics for infectious diseases, licensed a developmental antibiotic FP-100 acting selectively against a range of spirochetal pathogens from Northeastern University.

Today, research describing FP-100 and its properties was published in Cell. The lead author, Dr. Kim Lewis, is a co-founder and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Flightpath. The research demonstrates that FP-100 is actively transported into the cell of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, leading to highly potent and selective killing. FP-100 is similarly active against all other spirochetes tested. Remarkably, the drug has little effect on a broad array of symbiont bacteria (“good gut bacteria” in the microbiome) and has no detectable toxicity. This important finding led to the development of therapeutics that provide all the benefits of pathogen eradication, without the broad-spectrum antibiotic side-effect of damage to the sensitive gut microbiome which has been associated with increased risk of chronic diseases in both children and adults (Blaser et al).

The manuscript describing these findings has been made available on the Cell Press server.

Current Standard-of-Care broad-spectrum antibiotics (e.g., doxycycline, amoxicillin and penicillin) are commonly used to treat Borrelial and Treponemal infections. Unfortunately, these drugs also kill symbionts in the patient’s gut microbiome. An extensive and rapidly expanding body of evidence published in peer-reviewed journals suggests that broad-spectrum antibiotics increase the probability of developing secondary health complications and life-threatening chronic diseases, especially in children including diabetes, obesity, cancer and psychiatric conditions.

“Our team believes it is critical to advance alternative, narrow-spectrum antimicrobial drugs to treat specific infections without triggering unnecessary additional health problems for patients,” said Matt Tindall, Flightpath’s CEO. “At the same time, the global community must also find a way to reduce pressure on certain broad-spectrum antibiotics which are the last line of defense against life-threatening diseases. As we approach our IND filings to enter clinical studies, we believe FP-100 could serve as a leading example of such an alternative narrow-spectrum development program which could be used for a specific purpose and not exacerbate AMR.”

About Flightpath Biosciences

Flightpath Biosciences is a biotechnology company developing therapeutics and companion diagnostics to better understand and more effectively treat pathogen-mediated diseases with fewer unintended consequences. The company has combined leadership in microbiology, biotherapeutics development and bioinformatics with clinical and regulatory expertise to innovate a new precision infectious disease model.

Flightpath’s comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to infectious diseases like Lyme Disease offers a differentiated value proposition by leveraging “omics” data, companion diagnostics and targeted therapies in disease areas dominated by ubiquitous, “one-size-fits-all”, broad-spectrum antibiotics. The company recently graduated from the Illumina Accelerator and completed the largest and most comprehensive clinical biomarker study ever in Chronic Lyme Disease. We intend to use the scaled proprietary data sets to bring both definitive disease validation via novel diagnostics and the first new drugs to this patient population in decades.

For more information about Flightpath Biosciences, please visit www.flightpath.bio or follow us on LinkedIn.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211006005180/en/