Roche and Discuva have entered into a worldwide collaboration and license agreement for the discovery and development of new antibiotics to treat life-threatening infections caused by multi-drug resistant Gram-negative bacteria using Discuva’s proprietary SATINtechnology platform.

SATIN (Selective Antibiotic Target IdentificatioN) is an advanced next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics platform applied to unique bacterial transposon libraries. It is particularly suitable for identifying bacterial targets and selecting promising drug development candidates against multi-drug resistant bacteria.

Discuva will receive an upfront payment of $16 million, research fees and payments on multiple programs of up to $175 million per product, upon achievement of certain development, commercialization and sales milestones. In addition, Discuva will receive royalties on sales of products originating from this collaboration, which can reach double digit if products are based on Discuva’s proprietary early-stage antibiotic programs.