A new project from the company «Allopharm» received the status of participant of «Skolkovo».

The project «Development of medical products and preparations based on natural antimicrobial peptides that prevent the formation of biofilms by microorganisms» was recognized by experts of the center as technically feasible, competitive and with the potential for commercialization both in the Russian and international markets.

The World Health Organization calls the problem of the resistance of bacterial infections to antibiotics one of the main challenges to modern medicine. This resistance comes from the ability of bacteria to exchange genetic material containing relevant information about the blocking of the action of an antimicrobial drug, as well as the tendency of bacteria to form biofilms. The study of the first mechanism has been ongoing for several decades, however, the second became known only relatively recently. A biofilm is a complexly organized community of bacteria enclosed in an extracellular matrix of polysaccharides, proteins and nucleic acids. This matrix safely protects bacterial cells from the effects of antimicrobial factors, and the reduced metabolic activity of persistent bacteria makes them inaccessible to most antibiotics that are active mainly against actively dividing cells. To date, it has been shown that about 80% of all bacterial infections are associated with biofilms. Such infections are extremely difficult to treat.

The «Allopharm» project has an innovative potential for solving this problem.