Calla Lily Clinical Care to join Wellcome Leap’s Focused Antibiotics Program to address AMR
Calla Lily Clinical Care will evaluate its proprietary Callavid drug delivery platform as part of Wellcome Leap’s Focused Antibiotics program, exploring vaginal delivery of antibiotics for UTIs while reducing systemic exposure and impacts on the gut microbiome.
Calla Lily Clinical Care announced it has joined Wellcome Leap’s Focused Antibiotics program – a new $50M funded program to transform how antibiotics are delivered and address the growing global threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
The Focused Antibiotics program aims to leverage innovative technologies to address the unintended effects of antibiotic use, reformulating existing treatment options so they reach the site of infection while sparing the gut microbiome without loss of efficacy.
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are one of the most prevalent outpatient infections worldwide and the most common bacterial infection in women. As a result, women are prescribed almost 40% more antibiotics from the ages of 16 to 54 than men and are therefore disproportionately affected by the downstream systemic effects.
Calla Lily Clinical Care has been selected by Wellcome Leap to evaluate the use of its proprietary Callavid drug delivery platform to deliver antibiotics directly via the vaginal wall, bypassing GI transit and first-pass metabolism, and expected to confine systemic exposure to under 5%. Currently, no first-line UTI antibiotic is available in a mass-manufactured vaginal formulation and, if successful, this project will support the program’s broader objectives of reducing antibiotic-driven resistant infections by up to 40% per year.
