Women’s medtech company Calla Lily Clinical Care joined nonprofit Wellcome Leap’s $50 million Focused Antibiotics research program to advance its vaginal UTI treatment.
Calla Lily is developing Callavid, a proprietary drug platform that delivers antibiotics via the vaginal wall – potentially improving absorption and efficacy by bypassing the GI tract and first-pass metabolism, while reducing systemic exposure to less than 5%.
Founded by Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Leap launched its Focused Antibiotics Program to support research into targeted antibiotic delivery systems that avoid disrupting the gut microbiome, addressing antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which could contribute to more than eight million deaths by 2050.
Through the program Calla Lily will test the safety and efficacy of a targeted UTI vaginal treatment via Callavaid. If successful, the approach could reduce antibiotic-driven resistant infections by up to 40% annually.
“Our ambition has always been for Callavid to become the defining platform for intravaginal drug delivery across a wide range of indications,” said Thang Vo-Ta, Co-Founder and CEO of Calla Lily. “The Focused Antibiotics programme gives us the ideal partner to pursue one of the most consequential of those indications: treating the world’s most common bacterial infection in women while helping to address a global resistance crisis.”
