Sirenas LLC recently acquired a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant to develop early therapeutic leads that are inspired by nature -- against malaria, tuberculosis and cryptosporidium.
These neglected diseases desperately need treatments. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that over 1 billion people, typically in the poorest populations, have at least one neglected disease.
Usually, pharmaceutical companies don’t look for treatments for neglected diseases. This is because it can be challenging to break even after the expense of creating and manufacturing treatments for these illnesses. For this reason, governments and charitable foundations have an important role in developing the early stages of such therapeutics.
"Funds from this grant will help us rapidly identify nature-inspired chemistry that shows promise in treating neglected diseases -- and enable efficient translation, including novel synthetic approaches, of the most exciting discoveries into leads for clinical development," Dr. Eduardo Esquenazi, founder and CEO of Sirenas, said.
Sirenas works closely with other researchers to sustainably gather samples from marine organisms -- including cyanobacteria, sponges and algae -- because of their useful chemical diversity. This way, Sirenas can use countless nature-inspired molecules for therapeutic research through Atlantis, a proprietary machine learning data-mining technology.
"Marine organisms have evolved over hundreds of millions of years in highly competitive ecosystems, interacting with other organisms and creating complex symbiotic relationships," Esquenazi said. "As a result, these organisms develop chemistry that is far more diverse than what has evolved on land, and it has the potential to lay a foundation for a broad assortment of highly impactful therapeutics."
