Microbia Inc announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a patent protecting methods for regulating fungal gene expression that enable Microbia's fundamentally new approach to antifungal drug discovery and development.

Specifically, U.S. Patent No. 6,303,302, which has been issued to the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and exclusively licensed to Microbia, includes broad claims to methods of identifying and isolating genes involved in the regulation of fungal gene expression, methods useful for identifying fungal genes that promote infectivity, and methods of identifying agents that regulate the expression or activity of genes required for fungal infection. The inventions protected by this patent are the result of research by Microbia and Whitehead investigators based on work pioneered by Gerald R. Fink, who is Chair of Microbia's Scientific Advisory Board and a former director of the Whitehead Institute.

"Microbia is applying the technology protected by this patent to develop a new class of drugs-Anti-Invasins-that prevent fungal cells from invading human tissues," said Peter Hecht, CEO and a founder of Microbia. "We have already identified several classes of potential lead compounds with favorable in vitro activity against a variety of clinically important fungi."

The incidence of fungal infections has escalated dramatically in recent years, driven by the increasingly intensive and invasive nature of life-sustaining medical care and by a rise in the number of patients rendered immunocompromised by cancer chemotherapy, organ and bone marrow transplantation, and HIV/AIDS. Forty percent of systemic fungal infections are fatal, with even higher mortality rates (greater than 75 percent) for aspergillus infection. Current sales of antifungal therapeutics exceed $3 billion worldwide. The challenges to overcoming disease-causing fungi are formidable and highlight the significant need for new approaches.

The technologies covered by the patent have additional application in the Company's Precision Engineering approach to enhancing the bioproduction of a broad range of pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, and industrial metabolites. Microbia merges novel genetic and genomics tools with unique and detailed understanding of the regulation of cell circuitry to create microbial "mini-factories" with substantially improved parameters for the production of pharmaceutical and industrial molecules.