LeadtoTreat 5th progress meeting
The fifth progress meeting in LeadtoTreat has been hosted by NMI in Warsaw 24th-26th September 2024. The project has now been ongoing for 30 months, and the agenda focused on preparing for the coming review meeting with the EIC in October and planning for the final 18 months of the project. All work package leaders presented the achieved scientific and management results, scientific challenges were explained and discussed and plans for the next period were agreed upon. The project is progressing according to the plan, and here are some of the highlights summarising our activities:
- The work package devoted to screening of combinatorial effects between antibiotics and potentiators and different antibiotics has been finished. Synergistic and additive combinations have been identified and chosen as candidates for encapsulation. The work conducted in WP1 generated large data sets with interesting scientific data and will be shared with the scientific community through publishing.
- Selection and validation of nanobodies have been performed. We have developed a new screening assay to evaluate binding of peptide and nanobodies to MRSA and used this assay to evaluate the binding affinity of the candidates. Based on the results, initial selection of candidates for nanoformulation targeting is accomplished and production of these candidates will start during the next months.
- The production of polyphosphazene polymers has continued and we have a library of polymers with different characteristics.
- A large number of POPZ nano-formulations was produced and characterized. We have several candidates that show promising properties and good encapsulation of our proof of principle candidate MBL-AB01. We are employing additional characterization techniques such as field flow fractionation to gain better understanding and to investigate structure-function relationship between POPZ structure and formulation properties.
- The antibacterial activity of nano-formulations with our proof of principle candidate MBL-AB01 has been tested and evaluated.
The third day of the meeting was devoted to in-depth discussion of the results and planned activities for the next period. As always, the meeting took place in a friendly, highly collaborative and motivating atmosphere, which was appreciated by all participants.