Mission Statement
Many
successful drugs are natural products or derivatives of natural
products. In contrast to synthetic compounds, natural products are
not generated by chemical synthesis but instead isolated from
microorganisms, such as bacteria and fungi. The cyclic peptides
constitute an important group of natural product compounds. Drugs
such as vancomycin, daptomycin, caspofungin, cyclosporin, and
bleomycin all belong to this group and their successes in the clinic
demonstrate that cyclic peptides can be antibacterials and
antifungals, as well as immunosuppressive and even cancer
drugs.
AureoGen’s therapeutic focus is on antibiotics
and the company’s mission is to utilize state-of-the-art chemistry
and genetic engineering methodologies to generate novel drug
candidates from existing cyclic peptide templates.
About
Us
AureoGen
Biosciences was incorporated on August 12, 2003. The company’s
business is focused on the development of novel chemistry and genetic
engineering methodologies for the modification of cyclic
peptide-based compounds. Historically, structural modifications
required to convert a native cyclic peptide into a functional drug
often involved complicated and expensive synthetic chemistry
approaches. This hampered the development of many promising drug
candidates. It also prevented optimization (such as reduction of side
effects) of many existing drugs. AureoGen is taking advantage of
recent advances in medicinal chemistry to develop novel approaches
that allow efficient, cost-effective modification, optimization, and
production of cyclic peptide compounds. AureoGen’s chemistries
allow many modifications (to cyclic peptides) to be introduced
directly, without the need for the multiple synthesis steps,
disassembly of the core ring structure, and re-synthesis of large
portions of the molecule, that characterized older approaches.
Similarly, advances in biology and genetics have produced tools and
knowledge that allow efficient structural modification of cyclic
peptides by (genetic) engineering of the non-ribosomal peptide
synthase (NRPS) complexes responsible for their synthesis in the
producer organisms. Thus, using state-of-the-art chemical and genetic
engineering methodologies, AureoGen is producing novel cyclic
peptide-based drug candidates that are new chemical entities (NCEs)
and that have the pharmacological properties required for development
into useful therapeutics. AureoGen’s methodologies allow for the
efficient and cost-effective in-depth exploration of the
pharmacological properties (structure activity relationships, SAR) of
virtually any cyclic peptide, as well as simple and economical
generation of entirely novel cyclic peptides.