Demuris Limited

As the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic passes 1 million and healthcare systems around the globe are struggling to cope there is another problem on the horizon, of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the usage of antibiotics due to being administered to patients for the prevention of secondary bacterial infections. The...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) is the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB). The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that someone dies from TB every 20 seconds, which is around 1.7 million people per year. There is a growing emergence of M.tb strains which are resistant to first and second line antibiotic treatments. The bacterium can hide in the ...

New antibiotics are urgently needed to combat the rise of Multi-Drug Resistance (MDR), and by far the most pressing is the identification of compounds to inhibit MDR-Gram-negative pathogens, where the treatment options for several pathogens have become severely limited. Demuris is an SME with a world-leading collection of actinomycete bacteria which are b...

"Actinobacterial Natural Products are an important source of commercially used compounds, including many clinically used antibiotic, antifungal and anticancer compounds. The genes required to produce these compounds are encoded by Biosynthetic Gene Clusters (BGCs). Genomic sequence data have revealed the presence of a large fraction of putatively silent b...

Antibiotic discovery from natural sources is beset by the re-isolation of known compounds and the difficulties in working with wild-type strains. Demuris and TGAC will transform this approach and use genome sequencing to identify and dereplicate known antibiotic gene clusters from a set of high value actinomycete strains that produce broad-spectrum antibi...

New antibiotics are urgently needed to replace those that are lost to increasing antibiotic resistance. Ourtechniques focus on using Synthetic Biology to transfer the biosynthetic gene clusters for antibiotics frompoorly- and un-characterised environmental species into optimised SuperHosts. Traditional approaches for thisfocus on constructing bacterial or...

New antibiotics are urgently needed to replace those that are lost to increasing antibiotic resistance. Demuris has been using synthetic biology approaches to access these silent or cyptic gene clusters by heterologous production. We have been working to extract the biosynthetic genes from poor- or non-producing donor strains and introducing them to a Sup...

New antibiotics are urgently needed to replace and supplement those eroded by bacteria resistance. Synthetic biology approaches have vast potential to aid the discovery and development of antibiotics and other medicines. Benefits may include overcoming common problems associated with antibiotic discovery from natural sources such as poor growth characteri...

Demuris has a pipeline of novel antibiotics produced by a variety of different actinobacteria. The leading molecule is presently made by an organism that is not ideal for large scale fermentation, and the compound structure may not yet be optimal in terms of pharmacological properties. We wish to identify the antibiotic producer gene cluster and re-engine...

Antimicrobial resistance is regarded by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as one of the greatest threats to the human race. Several multi-drug-resistant strains are becoming untreatable, and due to the long development times there is an urgent need to accelerate research into new therapies. Unfortunately, many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the...

Infectious diseases remain a leading cause of global deaths. New diseases and the continuous rise of multi-drug resistant bacteria suggest that there will be a continual need for novel antibacterial therapies with superior activity and better tolerance. However the number of antibiotic compounds in development is worryingly small. Demuris has screened a u...