DART™
Drug and Antibiotic Resistance Technology Platform

Drug resistance (most notably antibiotics and anticancer drugs) is a serious and increasingly prevalent problem to the world medical community.  With regard to antibiotics, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have declared the current problem a "crisis".  The rate at which drugs, particularly antibiotics, become ineffective due to resistance, is also increasing at an alarming rate.  For example, it has been found that the onset of resistance to new antibiotics by target bacteria may occur in as little as only a few months after the drug has been widely used in a clinical setting.

DART™ is being developed to allow for the prediction of both the time and the actual molecular mechanism of drug resistance by target organisms (e.g. disease causing bacteria and fungi, cancer cell line, etc.), prior to the widespread clinical use of the drug.  This proprietary and patentable technology is based on the principles of directed evolution together with genetic, protein, and physiological analysis and characterization of the target organism.  Once completed, DART™ will allow pharmaceutical developers to predict the length of time a new drug may remain effective after introduction into the clinic, as well as the specific molecular mechanism(s) by which resistance may evolve (i.e. discovery and characterization of new, validated drug targets in resistant pathogens).  Subsequently, this allows a pharmaceutical developer to pre-plan second generation drugs and/or re-engineer primary compounds prior to clinical use in order to increase the initial period of efficacy.  This has significant economic importance to the global pharmaceutical industry, as well as the world health at large, by decreasing the occurrence of resistance by eliminating or delaying its onset.