Michael Murray’s career began with a detour. He once aimed to be a doctor but a dip in grades rerouted him into biology – and a passion for microbiology. His PhD involved quirky slime molds and DIY molecular biology kits, but ultimately his career path didn’t lay in the lab.
He joined the technology transfer group of the UK’s Medical Research Council where he became fascinated with the business world of dealmaking and commercial strategy. He worked with numerous companies and eventually founded his own consultancy, Murray International Partners.
He also got involved with start up biotech companies. He is the CEO of MetalloBio and the chair of Glox Therapeutics. Both companies focus on antimicrobial therapies – and opened his eyes to the problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We spoke with him to learn more.
How did it feel when you started to understand the scale of the AMR problem?
AMR has crept up all around us. You’re sitting on a beach, having a lovely afternoon, and you don’t notice the tide coming in. And then suddenly: ‘oh my goodness, the water’s quite deep.’ But it’s okay because it’s only knee deep.
By the time you’ve packed up and started wading out, however, it’s waist deep. And now there’s a real problem.
It sounds simplistic, but this is what has happened with AMR. I was deeply shocked to learn the scale of the problem. You’d think that a microbiology degree and a general scientific interest would have made me more aware of it, but I really didn’t realize the level of crisis.
However, it is more nuanced than people assume. In Western civilization, the problem is there but it’s not as acute. Around 70 percent of the problem is being borne by emerging nations and low- and middle-income countries. Of course, these aren’t the markets where drug makers are looking to make their money.
And something else that I was really ignorant of was the sheer complexity of the issue. It’s not just about human health; antibiotics are woven into treatment pathways in all kinds of ways, including in food production, which makes it a really tough nut to crack.
What doesn’t surprise me is that not many people know about it. It’s not a topic that’s really in the news – although it’s started to bubble up again in recent months. But the general public? They don’t know there’s a problem. And that’s terrifying.
Consider this. In 2023, two strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae came into the UK from Thailand. They cause a sexually transmitted infection, and there isn’t a single antibiotic in most pharmacies that can treat them. Now imagine young people in their 20s and 30s enjoying themselves on a trip and coming back with an infection. They go to the doctor, and after 11 antibiotics, nothing is working. That’s a sobering thought and it’s not far-fetched. The global mobility of people today is absolutely contributing to the issue.
Do people in western countries take antibiotics for granted?
Even among educated people and professionals, there’s often no real understanding of the difference between a viral infection, a protozoal infection, a bacterial infection, and a fungal infection. And honestly, I think it’s down to us, in the science community, to get better at communicating. We’ve got to step up.
Tell us about Glox Therapeutics and its platform…
Before working with Glox, I didn’t know anything about bacteriocins, even though I studied microbiology! But right away, the science was fascinating.
Bacteriocins are naturally produced, protein-based antibiotics made by bacteria. I had no idea they even existed. Glox’s work stands in real contrast to the “carpet bombing” approach of traditional antibiotics, where you're trying to hit broad-spectrum targets, across both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Glox is taking more of a sniper-shot approach.
So, take Pseudomonas as an example. Several species of Pseudomonas are heavily implicated in respiratory infections, especially in patients who are intubated in hospital.
Glox’s work could, in principle, be applied to almost any bacterial genus. They're tapping into the natural production of bacteriocins and building biotechnology constructs – not by altering the core components, but by combining them with other elements that make them viable as precision therapeutic agents.
In the case of Pseudomonas, the bacteriocins produced are often specifically targeted at other pseudomonads to eliminate close competitors – this approach is how the bacteria create space for themselves. Many bacteriocins are exquisitely selective. Glox is developing what they call “rocket launchers.” They will take the best bacteriocins they’ve identified and aim to push the spectrum a little wider, while still targeting just a single bacterial genus. It’s essentially a precision medicine approach.
Glox’s positioning is very specific. They are targeting very sick patients in an ICU, who are likely intubated, with serious infections. The drug is designed for intravenous delivery. It is short-acting but extremely potent. In head-to-head studies against traditional antibiotics, the bacteriocins are often 10 to 100 times more potent, gram-for-gram or molecule-for-molecule.
When I met the team, it sealed the deal for me. With many young companies, the problem is usually loads of great science out, but a lack of commercial drive or team cohesion.
Glox’s CEO, James Clark, has a lot of experience and we are good foils for each other. I could see right away that this was a genuinely novel, well-thought-out approach, and the progress they’ve made just in the few months I’ve been involved has been breathtaking.
With any company, it comes down to the team. The real test is: can a team dust themselves off after a setback and keep going? I’ve seen teams that are full of energy until the first hiccup. Then the bickering starts and people bail. Someone gets distracted by another opportunity and suddenly the whole thing falls apart.
What you want is a team that can take a hit, get back in the saddle, and get going again. And the scientific team at Glox? They’ve got that in abundance.
But it’s not just about getting along; it’s also about quality and determination. The AMR market is tough. The prevailing mantra out there is, “You can’t make money in AMR.”
Now, all of us in the field clearly disagree. It’s not about whether you can make money, it's about how much, and what kind of returns you can expect. That said, I think the environment is changing. We’ve seen real progress, and this is one of the areas where the UK is genuinely leading.
The UK came up with what is known as the “subscription model.” This model incentivises antibiotic development by paying companies a set annual fee for access to a drug, rather than paying per prescription. It decouples usage from revenue, which makes a lot of sense in AMR.
Europe’s been exploring similar ideas, with some nations starting to move toward a subscription-like model. If more counties adopt such a model, it could become the de facto way forward for antibiotics. That would make a massive difference for companies like Glox.
What stage is Glox at now?
We’re in preclinical and pretty close to selecting our nominated construct. There are a few that have real potential.
But there are challenges. This is a modality and an approach that people just aren’t that familiar with. The conundrum in pharma innovation is that everybody wants something new… but not that new, thank you very much. All companies say they want innovation, but very few are willing to be the first ones to take the first step into the unfamiliar.
Glox’s product will also be a biologic, which means there can be issues with scale up – although the work the team has done so far is brilliant.
I had my thoughts; I opined that they should go in a slightly different direction and try something more reliable. They looked at it, tried a different approach that at first looked promising, then seemed to falter… and then, suddenly, they cracked it. And it looks great! The yields are fantastic for some of the constructs, but there is still purification to consider and we need enough material to make progress. We continue to work through all of this.
In an ideal world, what changes would you like to see in regulation, reimbursement, etc to help new antibiotic development succeed?
We need to get better at articulating the value of antibiotics. The reality is tough. Antibiotics cost just as much as most other drugs to develop. As a company, do you spend $2.8 billion over 12 years to make an anti-cancer agent that will return $15 billion a quarter? Or spend the same amount to develop an antibiotic that might make $50 million a year?
The idea that you can’t make money from antibiotics is still a challenge, but their value as medicines is enormous. If you take antibiotics out of modern healthcare, a hip replacement becomes all but impossible. Same for knee surgery. Even something as basic as a tooth extraction carries major risks. The procedures we think of as routine suddenly become dangerous.
Cancer clinicians are terrified of AMR. They can treat a patient with a £45,000-a-year biologic and maybe extend their life by six months, but that patient will likely be in hospital, on a drip, which comes with a risk of infection. I often say to pharma companies that they should be worried that they won’t be able to sell their expensive cancer drugs in the future because of lack of antibiotic support. From that perspective, it makes sense to invest in antibiotics as a kind of loss leader to support the multi-billion-dollar products. (But like most multinationals, they’re looking at sales quarter by quarter and not lifting their heads enough to look acutely at the next five years.) There’s a massive disconnect between the timelines on which economics hit companies, and the timelines we need to think about for antibiotic development.
We’ve also got to get out of just talking to the knowledge base. We’ve got to make more of an impact amongst the general public.
During COVID-19, the human race was in an existential crisis with predictions saying that a large percentage of the global population could die. We’ve completely forgotten about that now. Why? Because we asked the scientists and they came up with something that worked.
But it worked because it had 30 years of R&D behind it before it was deployed. And actually, we got lucky. The vaccine approach that worked against the coronavirus was the first time that particular platform had ever worked. Nobody had managed to hit that type of virus before.
The public may not appreciate that so there’s an onus on companies to broadcast the AMR issue more broadly.
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