Two-year-old La Jolla pharmaceutical to work on drug discoveries
By Bradley J. Fikes
UT San Diego
RQx Pharmaceuticals could get more than $111 million under a drug discovery deal announced Tuesday with biotech giant Genentech.
Two-year-old RQx is researching new antibiotics, a need that becomes increasingly urgent as more bacteria become resistant to existing drugs. Genentech was the world’s first biotechnology company. Now a unit of the Swiss drug company Roche, Genentech has a local presence through its drug manufacturing plant in Oceanside.
Under the agreement, La Jolla-based RQx will get an upfront payment, and is eligible to receive up to an additional $111 million in research and development milestone payments. Moreover, the privately held company is eligible for royalties on sales of any products arising from the deal that reach the market.
Court Turner, chief executive of RQx and venture partner at Avalon Ventures, declined to disclose the size of the upfront payment, other than to characterize it is as a “premium” amount.
RQx was founded by Avalon Ventures and Floyd Romesberg, a scientist at The Scripps Research Institute, along with two of Romesberg’s former graduate students.
RQx has spent about half the $7 million that Avalon invested in the company, Turner said. “In short order, and with a small amount of dollars, we were able to find ideas and compounds that had eluded folks for many years,” he said.
Turner said Avalon intends to wind down the company as products are transferred to Genentech for clinical development.
Romesberg, the Scripps researcher, has focused his antibiotic studies on arylomycin compounds, naturally produced narrow-spectrum antibiotics. Most bacteria are resistant to these compounds, due to mutations that block its effect. Romesberg and colleagues found a way to alter the structure of arylomycin to overcome those mutations, making it effective against many more bacteria. This feat has the potential of turning the arylomycins into a new category of broad-spectrum antibiotics.