LeadtoTreat 4th progress meeting

The LeadtoTreat consortium gathered for its fourth progress meeting in the SINTEF office in Brussel on the 12th-14th March 2024. This ambitious project has now been running for 24 months and a large amount of work has been carried out by all partners. As with all the previous meetings, we started with a systematic review of the past and ongoing activities with a focus on upcoming milestones and deliverables. All work package leaders presented the achieved scientific and management results, challenges we are facing and plans for the next period. The project is progressing according to the plan, and here are some of the highlights summarising our activities:

• We have now finalized screening of combinatorial effects between antibiotics and potentiators and different antibiotics. Synergistic and additive combinations have been identified for many MRSA strains. Based on these results, several combinations of antibiotics have been chosen as candidates for encapsulation.
• Following three rounds of immunization campaigns in alpacas and identification, isolation and selection of nanobodies, validation and final selection of nanobody candidates for targeting is ongoing. The nanobodies include both candidates against inflammatory markers and MRSA surface proteins.
• We have successfully produced and characterized multiple polyphosphazene polymers.
• The antibacterial activity of our lead candidate MBL-AB01 has been extensively tested in 117 MRSA and 7 MSSA strains.
• Large number of nanoformulations of MBL-AB01 and its combination with other antibiotics were produced and characterized.

The last part of the second day and the third day of the meeting were devoted to discussion of the results and the planned activities for the next period. The 4th progress meeting in Brussel was enjoyed by all participants.