We at Invitris
Our Challenge
10 million deaths per year – or 25% more deaths than cancer. This is the future predicted by an expert panel if we do not create new drugs against microbial infections NOW!
Drug-resistant bacteria are threatening to catapult our global societies back into the pre-antibiotic era, inhibiting not only the successful treatment of common infections but also all therapies that rely on infection control, including surgeries and cancer therapy. Besides this endless suffering, this may cause an economic burden of several trillions of US Dollars to healthcare systems worldwide.
Our Vision
We envision a world where any bacterial infection is effectively cured by the most abundant virus in the world: bacteriophages. Our unique technology will establish the basis to win the billion-year-old battle between bacteriophages and bacteria.
Our Mission
To achieve our goals, we are leveraging our universal platform technology to develop highly effective phage-based drugs with novel therapeutic mechanisms that are able to cure infections where other drugs failed.
Our Story
We are a spin-off of the successful iGEM (“international Genetically Engineered Machine Competition”) Munich Team of 2018, Phactory, which was hosted by the lab of Prof. Simmel. We started our journey in early 2018 by the formation of our iGEM Team supported by the Chair of Physics of Synthetic Biological Systems. After several rounds of brainstorming, we came up with our project idea to leverage cell-free technology to assemble phages, started to build our first prototypes, worked hard, and organized the European Meetup with more than 200 participants. Finally, in October, all iGEM teams from around the world met in Boston to present their results. That is where we won the first runner-up award among 350 other teams and were awarded several prizes, including “Best in Entrepreneurship”.
Motivated by this success, we formed a core team, acquired 2 million US dollars in non-dilutive capital, expanded our team, and are now working relentlessly to develop and validate novel drugs against therapeutic indications with a high unmet need.
