Targanta Therapeutics (Montreal, PQ)

CMDF Investment: $8,584,000.00
Focus: Infectious Dieases  
www.targanta.com

Targanta Therapeutics is a private biopharmaceutical company; internally developing a portfolio of small molecule antibacterial products. The Company was founded in 1997 by faculty members from McGill University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently staffed with 33 employees. Targanta is developing small-molecule antibacterial agents aiming at the disruption of the DNA replication and transcription machinery through the targets of bacteriophages ("phages"); viruses that attack bacteria. This approach effectively mimics strategies devised through four billion years of evolutionary pressure with regards to the selection of druggable bacterial targets; in contrast to current drug discovery efforts; which often focus on comparative functional bacterial genomics. The Company has been able to identify the molecular interactions enabling phages to hamper bacterial sustainability; and thereby has validated an innovative process for identifying novel drug targets and a new class of proprietary antibacterial molecules. Targanta's approach circumvents the demonstrated limitations of sequencing bacterial genomes as a way to identify novel antibacterial targets and new classes of antibacterials. The Company is in the process of converting this unique expertise in terms of target validation into novel antibacterial drugs.