After two years of fruitful collaboration, AstraZeneca is opting to acquire its partner and bacterial vaccine technology startup, Omniose.
For an undisclosed sum, AstraZeneca will incorporate the preclinical biotech into its wider operations – meaning the company will form part of AstraZeneca’s infectious disease unit. As the companies join forces, Omniose will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of the UK-Swedish pharma giant.
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At the heart of this acquisition is Omniose’s bioconjugation platform, which the Missouri-based biotech designed to facilitate the production and joining of “virtually any” bacterial polysaccharide and an engineered carrier protein – the constituents of conjugate vaccines – in a single bacterial cell. This approach to conjugate vaccine development, Omniose says, could represent a more simplified and precise method compared with traditional chemical-based approaches, which are often cumbersome and challenging to perform at scale.
According to Benjamin Moutier, SVP of infectious disease at AstraZeneca, Omniose’s bioconjugation platform constitutes a “differentiated approach” to engineering conjugate vaccines – offering the pharma company the ability to develop novel shots against some of the most serious bacterial infections impacting patients today.
AstraZeneca’s acquisition of Omniose comes a little after the pair initiated a three-year, exclusive bioconjugate vaccine-focused research collaboration beginning in 2024, which primarily focused on developing vaccines against multidrug-resistant “superbugs” that have previously proved challenging to develop preventative jabs for.
This remains an important area of development, as the evolution of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) becomes an increasingly notable issue across the global healthcare landscape. With certain bacterial strains evolving to resist commonly prescribed antibiotics, such as Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), drug-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, preventative measures could be the next step to preventing hard-to-treat infections.
While neither Omniose nor AstraZeneca has disclosed what bacterial strains the company will focus on, Omniose has published research on its work around certain species and families of bacteria.
This includes Klebsiella pneumoniae, which can result in pneumonia, urinary tract infections (UTIs) and more, as well as species across the Moraxellaceae family. Omniose has also shared data from preclinical mouse studies on an invasive pneumococcal disease candidate, which was found to protect recipients from systemic infection.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), bacterial AMR caused around 4.7 million deaths globally in 2021, and around one in six laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections were deemed resistant to antibiotics in 2023. This trend, the agency says, is partially due to the misuse and overuse of antimicrobials – which is contributing to the spread of drug-resistant strains – as well as the lack of suitable access to new and existing vaccines and diagnostics on a global scale.
