C-CAMP supported startup Tranalab joins Wellcome Leap’s Focused Antibiotics Programme

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Tranalab, a Bengaluru based biotechnology startup in the drug discovery domain, has been selected to join Wellcome Leap’s Focused Antibiotics programme, which aims to reformulate existing antibiotics to spare the gut microbiome without loss of treatment efficacy.

If successful, the Focused Antibiotics programme could reduce the global annual occurrence of antibiotic-driven resistant infections by as much as 40%, potentially avoiding over 100 million resistant infections even within a decade of real-world use.

With Leap support, Tranalab will extend their proprietary macrophage targeted drug delivery platform to address lower respiratory tract bacterial infections. The platform evolved from their work on targeting a rare disease biotherapeutic to macrophages that was supported by C-CAMP BIRAC Biotechnology Ignition Grant (BIG), BIRAC’s National Biopharma Mission programme and the Government of Karnataka under its ELEVATE programme.

Tranalab’s foray into AMR started when it was selected as one of the winners of C-CAMP CARB-X AMR Quest (2023). Tranalab is also developing antivirals against dengue, the early phase of that was supported by LifeArc, UK.

Established by the Wellcome trust in 2020, Wellcome Leap is a US based nonprofit that accelerates breakthroughs in human health. 

Founded in 2017, Tranalab is incubated at the Centre for Human Genetics, Bengaluru. The Tranalab principal investigator (PI) for the Focused Antibiotics program will be Dr Chandramowli Ganesh (co-founder, Director and chief scientific officer, Tranalab) and co-PI will be Dr Nitin S. Deshpande (co-founder, Director and chief executive officer, Tranalab).