ANTIMICROBIAL REGENERATION CONSORTIUM

Upcoming events

ARC Laboratories Seminar Series

Dr. John Aunins. Monday, February 10, 2:30–3:30 p.m. at the University of Colorado Boulder, JSCBB A108

ARC is kicking off a new seminar series, designed to empower voices from every level of medicine—from those creating it to those receiving it. We are pleased to welcome Dr. John Aunins from Seres Therapeutics as our first speaker, discussing his work in the development of live bacterial therapeutics.

With more than 26 years of experience, John Aunins is an internationally recognized figure in the biotechnology industry. After earning his PhD in Chemical Engineering at MIT in 1989, Dr. Aunins built a portfolio focused on bio process development, manufacturing support, and project leadership with Merck Research Laboratories. He has contributed to a variety of products, including Gardasil and Vagta, both of which won ACS Industrial Biotechnology Awards.

Currently, Dr. Aunins serves as the Executive Vice President of Bioprocess & Manufacturing and CTO of Seres Therapeutics.

“A disease outbreak in one part of the world affects the entire world. Its time to change the game-plan of how we deal with Super bugs."

Antimicrobial resistance is a major health crisis humanity faces today affecting both high and low-income countries. The emergence of super bugs and pan-resistant bacterial pathogens, a shrinking pipeline of antibiotics, ineffective therapy in the face of multi-drug resistant pathogens underscores the need for new antibiotics and new antibiotic classes. Back in 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that more that 2 million people were infected by antibiotic-resistant infections every year in the US alone, with at least 23,000 succumbing to those infections.

An alarming estimate is that if unchecked super bugs will be responsible for more than 10 million deaths each year by 2050, far outpacing all other major causes like diabetes, cancer, and road accidents, and its economic impact will reach $100 trillion by 2050. Therefore, the goal of Antimicrobial Regeneration Consortium (ARC) is to develop a rapid antibiotic development pipeline to enable high-throughput discovery of therapeutics that will allow targeting of any current or emergent pathogens.

ARC is designed to respond to the global health issue of antimicrobial resistance by accelerating drug research from start to finish through minimizing time required for fund-raising, maximizing researchers’ time for investigation, and providing a pathway for fast translation to clinic. With ARC’s innovative and interdisciplinary approach to medicine, ARC Labs envisions that one day we will be able to respond to emerging health threats in real-time. Our efforts are being designed to handle the extreme, thus providing a response to current and future potential health crises.