Riptide Bioscience Awarded NIH Grant to Address Diabetic Ulcers

September 19, 2018

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. – Riptide Bioscience, Inc., announced that it has been awarded a $227,000 grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), to develop peptide therapeutics targeting diabetic foot ulcers.

According to NIDDK, diabetes afflicts 30 million people in the United States. Ulceration is among the most serious results of diabetes, and also among the most common: surveys show that some 25% of diabetics suffer foot ulcers. A recent study showed that 15% of patients with an infected ulcer died within a year, and an additional 15% required amputation.

Infected ulcers are particularly resistant to treatment with conventional antibiotics, partly because the bacteria that colonize ulcers excrete protective "biofilm" shielding them from therapeutic drugs.

Dr. L. Edward Clemens, Principal Investigator on the NIDDK grant, commented, "Riptide has developed a therapeutic approach which promises to resolve the major deficiencies of current treatments. Our drug candidates are highly engineered analogues of natural host defense peptides, developed over many years of design iterations. These readily penetrate biofilm and have broad-spectrum activity against the bacteria which typically colonize diabetic ulcers."

Clemens continued, "This class of engineered peptides also shows remarkable resilience in tests involving repetitive treatments. Where conventional antibiotics rapidly lose their efficacy as bacteria develop resistance to them, our drug candidates show almost no loss of efficacy. Since resistant infections pose an especially serious threat to diabetic patients, this represents a key advantage of these peptide therapeutics."

"We believe that there is real potential here to greatly improve the usual course of therapy and reduce the enormous toll of death and disability due to diabetes."

Riptide Bioscience, Inc., with laboratories in Vallejo, California, maintains an intensive program of research into peptide-based therapeutics. Contact: info@riptidebio.com