developing new antibiotics for treating multi-drug resistant Gram-negative bacterial infection.
And so RQx Therapeutics was born. In a regulatory filing at this time last year, Avalon disclosed that it was providing the first $1 million of what could be as much as $7 million in funding for the company. Since then, San Diego’s Correlation Ventures has joined as a venture investor.
Today, the company consists of five regular employees (including two former grad students from Romesberg’s lab). Over the past year, the scientific team has validated the target initially identified in Romesberg’s lab, and added hundreds of arylomycin analogs to the RQx library.
“The RQx story is early but very encouraging and impressive, especially considering that Big Pharma has been focused on this target for many years,” Turner says. At this point, he added, the team is focused on “getting the data to an inflection point that would be interesting to Big Pharma.
“If you can kill bacteria in a mouse, it’s very translatable [to human beings], so it would be easier to make early calls” to prospective industry partners, Turner says. “We are in a very good position now to partner the program.”
As for their initial meeting, which led directly to the founding of RQx, Romesberg says, “It really was pretty serendipitous.”
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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