EnBiotix, a bioengineering company, is teaming with the Mayo Clinic to further develop the Cambridge, MA-based firm’s drug candidate designed to treat staphylococcus aureus infections in prosthetic joints.
Additionally, the company said it received a funding award from Mayo Clinics Ventures. The amount of the funding wasn’t disclosed.
The drug, currently named EPP-001, is being developed in combination with standard antibiotic therapy to fight prosthetic joint infections caused by staphylococcus aureus, the company said. Typically, attempts to treat such infections with antibiotics alone fail up to 50% of the time.
The incident of such infections in prosthetic joints is expected to grow exponentially as the population ages and more hip and knee replacements are conducted. It’s expected that by 2020 about 2 million patients each year will receive a hip or knee replacement, of which about 2% to 3% will develop the debilitating infections that have become more drug-resistant and drug-tolerant, EnBiotix said.
The current standard of care to treat prosthetic joint infection “salvage therapy failures” is an expensive two-step surgical process that involves removing the joint, debridement, and replacement of the joint.
“Our team looks forward to working with Mayo Clinic to accelerate the development of EPP-001 to address the significant unmet medical need that arises from prosthetic joint infections,” Dr. Jeffrey D. Wager, chairman and CEO of EnBiotix, said in a statement.
- here’s the release
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