Antibiotics and antifungals are among the most significant medical inventions of the last century — but decades of use have driven rising antimicrobial resistance, and resistant infections are harder, slower and more expensive to treat with existing systemic drugs. At the same time, many common infections — genital, dermatologic, HPV-associated — are chronic, recurrent or persistent enough that a single systemic course often isn't the end of the story.
We think there's room for a different approach: therapies delivered locally, directly to the site of infection, designed to reduce reliance on systemic treatment and to reach disease that current standards of care manage imperfectly.
Cancer treatment has evolved the same way infectious disease treatment has — enormously effective once disease is advanced, at real cost to the body. We're building toward catching both kinds of disease earlier, while they're still localized, and treating them there.