Mila – Quebec AI Institute, the world’s largest academic deep learning (DL) research center has today announced a new partnership with biotechnology company, Lixa. The collaboration brings together Lixa's antibiofilm knowledge and capabilities and Mila's expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), igniting a beacon of hope in the battle against one of the greatest threats to global health.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a significant challenge to modern medicine, jeopardizing the effectiveness of antibiotics and threatening to take the lives of 10 million people per year by 2050.
Driven by personal experiences, the Australian based Lixa is developing novel, scalable nonantibiotic technologies to reverse AMR and restore the efficacy of antibiotics or biocides for anyone, anything and anywhere. Lixa’s first pipeline project is NeoXTM, a class of small molecules that break down the protective layer surrounding bacterial colonies (the biofilm) and enhances bacterial vulnerability to agents that kill bacteria (whether from the innate immune system or antibiotics). The NeoXTM agents are part of a new class of antimicrobials, called antibiofilms, and are expected to be an integral part of a new post-antibiotic era of solving infectious diseases.
“Partnering with Mila is especially important for Lixa’s mission to solve AMR. The Mila AI capabilities are world leading and we hope that this partnership is laying the foundation for a new way of mitigating infectious diseases, accessible to people all over the world.” said Lixa CEO, Dr Maud Eijkenboom.
"Tackling anti-microbial resistance is crucial for safeguarding the effectiveness of our medical resources, as it preserves our ability to treat infections and prevent their devastating consequences. Mila is proud to partner with organizations like Lixa, proposing novel approaches to this significant global challenge," explained Stéphane Létourneau, Mila's Executive Vice-President.
Together, Lixa and Mila aim to transform the approach to combating drug-resistant infections and open the door to even more cross-disciplinary, international partnerships that are key to solving AMR on a global scale.
About Lixa
Lixa is an Australian based biotechnology company developing revolutionary, broadly applicable and scalable solutions for Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and the US$5T/annum global biofilm problem.
Biofilms are impenetrable to antibiotics or even the immune system, and underly 80% of chronic, recurring infections. Although bacterial biofilms are a key AMR cause, clinicians have no effective and safe antibiofilm drugs to combat resistant infections. Not only for human and animal health, biofilms are also a problem on ship hulls, water filters, livestock environment or surgical implants.
Lixa is developing NeoXTM, a disruptive, proprietary, antibiofilm platform technology to resolve recurring microbial infections and contaminations for anyone, anything and anywhere. Find out more at www.lixa.life
About Mila
Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Mila is an artificial intelligence research institute that brings together over 1,000 researchers specializing in machine learning. Based in Montreal, Mila’s mission is to be a global hub for scientific advances that inspire innovation and development of AI for the benefit of all. Mila is a non-profit organization recognized worldwide for its significant contributions to the field of deep learning, particularly in language modeling, machine translation, object recognition, and generative models. For more information, visit mila.quebec.
