The round includes investments from life sciences entrepreneurs and investors Mikael Lönn, MD and Jens Mogensen, alongside GU Ventures, Vasa Angels, and the state-owned venture capital firm Annexstruktur – as well as from Gobia Enterprises, a family-owned investment firm focusing on life sciences.

“There hasn’t been a new class of antibiotics developed since 1987, and I’m incredibly excited about the potential of EbsArgent. With its novel mechanism of action on a new target, and extensive testing that has demonstrated its effectiveness against a wide range of drug-resistant pathogens, EbsArgent could give us a valuable new weapon in the fight against antibiotic resistance,” says Mikael Lönn.

Complete preclinical studies and initiate Phase I trials

TXN Systems will use proceeds from the Series A to complete preclinical studies of its patented EbsArgent and initiate Phase I clinical trials of the therapeutic in Urinary tract infections (UTIs).

“Urinary tract infections, once easily cured, are becoming more and more resistant to multiple antibiotics and some standard treatments no longer work,” says TXN Systems CEO Elias Arnér. “However, the burden of antimicrobial resistance across healthcare will be of unprecedented levels, in all geographic regions. We have evaluated EbsArgent against a wide range of clinically derived bacterial strains of many different species, each with pronounced resistance against most, or all, of the currently available antibiotics. EbsArgent shows strong efficacy against all of them. We’re extremely pleased to attract such high-caliber investors, and grateful for the confidence they have in our novel technology. We look forward to working with them to advance EbsArgent.”

A combination drug

EbsArgent is a combination drug containing silver ions and the compound ebselen to achieve a novel mechanism of action. By utilizing ebselen to disable the essential bacterial thioredoxin enzyme system and leveraging silver ions to synergistically enhance ebselen uptake, EbsArgent achieves a high level of bactericidal activity, it states. Several studies have validated the bacterial thioredoxin reductase enzyme as a novel target for antimicrobial therapeutic development. No occurrence of cross-resistance with other antibiotics has been observed, likely because the thioredoxin system is not targeted by commercially available antibiotics and ebselen is a novel type of molecule compared to other antibiotics, describes the company.

In mouse models, EbsArgent has demonstrated safety, low toxicity, and good efficacy in multidrug-resistant gram-negative infections and multidrug-resistant urinary tract infections specifically, the company describes further. It also shows promising activity against the formation of biofilms with many bacterial strains, including E. coli, which is preferable because bacteria grown as biofilm make complicated UTIs more difficult to treat.