Boehringer Ingelheim, Evotec SE and bioMérieux announced that they have formed a joint venture to create the next generation of antimicrobials along with actionable diagnostics to fight Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). The resulting company, Aurobac Therapeutics SAS, will combine the best capabilities of the three founding companies towards developing a new precision medicine approach, from diagnosis to cure. The aspiration is to succeed in the fight against AMR, which is a major public health threat.

Having routine surgery such as caesarean sections or hip replacements may become life threatening, and complications from common diseases such as diabetes and injuries or cuts will become harder to manage because of growing resistance to antibiotics in patients. Aurobac will work to shift the strategy related to antibiotic treatment regimens which at the moment leans heavily on empirical approaches using broad-spectrum and unfocused medicines. The goal is to turn this into a precision approach, using new highly effective and targeted modalities, combined with rapid and actionable diagnostics to quickly identify pathogens and their resistance patterns, and supported by new economic models.

Funded by Boehringer Ingelheim as lead investor with 30 million EUR and by Evotec and bioMérieux with 5 million EUR each, the 40 million EUR joint venture, which has its headquarters in Lyon (France), combines the world leading expertise of Evotec, one of the most active research companies in infectious diseases, with bioMérieux's market-leading expertise in infectious disease diagnostics and with Boehringer Ingelheim's broad drug discovery and significant clinical development capabilities. Boehringer Ingelheim's participation in Aurobac is part of a wider so-called pandemic preparedness initiative, which includes a 50 million EUR investment in the AMR action fund by Boehringer Ingelheim. Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund has committed to invest up to 12 million EUR in AMR infection companies.