In September 2026, the whole Amprologix team travelled to Lisbon for GAMRIC 2026: the Global Antimicrobial Resistance Innovators Conference, organised by ESCMID. This was our first time attending this conference, and we were looking forward to meeting with other start ups, and hear from organisations such as CARB-X and GARDP.
Sharing our data
On day one we gave a flash talk introducing our AI guided pipeline for antimicrobial peptide discovery. The talk covered the concept behind the approach, which uses a conditional variational autoencoder (cVAE) to design novel antimicrobial peptide candidates predicted to have potent antimicrobial activity and low toxicity to human cells. We also shared some example data about some peptides that we have generated using this method. This work was developed in collaboration with Ingenza, with particular thanks to Jack Kay, who developed the framework for this method during his PhD.
We were also pleased to receive a ‘top abstract’ award for our submitted poster, which was displayed throughout the conference and generated some interesting discussions with other attendees.
Catch ups and conversations
Beyond the programme of scheduled talks, GAMRIC also provided plenty of opportunities to meet other start-ups, academic researchers, and representatives of funding bodies. Over the course of a few coffees and the Portuguese favourite ‘pastéis de nata’, we caught up with some old colleagues, and met some new faces. Including the Dutch representatives from Ecraid, who amazingly share our appreciation for Plymouth gin.
We came away with new connections across the AMR research and development community, and had some excellent conversations about the scientific and commercial challenges facing the field.
The same two topics came up in pretty much every conversation: the overall difficulty of the journey from pre-clinical data to approved drug, and the chronic underfunding of antibiotic development. Push and pull incentives are widely agreed to be part of the answer to this issue. The NHS has piloted a subscription access model, and BARDA in the US provides funding through later clinical development stages. But progress is moving more slowly than the problem demands. With drug-resistant infections continuing to rise each year, there remains a clear case for accelerating both the science and the surrounding policy, and Amprologix is actively working to be part of the solution.
New ideas and next steps
Conferences like GAMRIC are valuable for us not just for sharing our own data, but also for the new ideas that we are able to take back to the lab with us. Hearing about other groups' approaches to the antibiotic discovery problem is a useful prompt to think about our own pipeline with fresh eyes. We came back from Lisbon with a list of new ideas to develop and some productive new connections to explore.
In the meantime, if you would like to learn more about the programme to develop our lead drug candidate NI01, or our AI discovery pipeline, you can find our published work on our publications page, or get in touch directly on our email info@amprologix.com.
