A group of bacteria inhabit soil and water all over the globe. For many of us, these microscopic germs go completely unnoticed over an entire lifetime, since a functioning immune system readily rids the body of them.
But the bacteria are cousins to tuberculosis - and they pose a significant health threat for a growing number of people in the 21st century. For those in the developed world who have weakened natural defenses, like those who have had organ transplants or those who have lung disease like COPD or cystic fibrosis, even common tap water can cause a chronic infection of these “non-tuberculous mycobacteria,” or NTM. The affliction can be deadly – and it proves incredibly stubborn to the limited number of treatment options available right now. What’s more, the number of U.S. cases has more than doubled in recent years, according to some estimates.
The Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) may now have an answer to this emerging threat - and a new development agreement aims to leverage the CDI science to save lives as soon as possible.
The CDI’s top NTM scientists, Véronique Dartois, Ph.D., and Thomas Dick, Ph.D., have developed new compounds which are now subject of a new collaboration and license agreement with the Switzerland-based and publicly listed BioVersys AG. As announced on March 31 , the two parties will jointly profile and develop rifamycin candidates identified by HMH.
The breakthrough is the product of decades of work in NTM and TB work for Dartois and Dick.
Last year the longtime collaborators (and married couple) published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The researchers took a hyper-detailed look into the problem of Mycobacterium abscessus, an NTM which is a mounting danger among immunocompromised patients and people suffering from certain lung diseases. The CDI team, together with Courtney Aldrich, PhD and Tian Lan (University of Minnesota), consequently chemically re-engineered a widely-used rifamycin antibiotic so that it can effectively treat infections in these neediest patients more effectively than ever before.
A critical new drug could result from this discovery, they concluded at the time .
The conundrum as it stands now: the current series of antibiotics known as rifamycins were developed in the 1960s and have historically proven very effective against TB itself. But the bacteria M. abscessus has proven molecularly resistant to these drugs. Furthermore, the cystic-fibrosis patients who are most endangered by M. abscessus infections are subject to drug-to-drug interactions.
Using a “medicinal chemistry rationale,” the team of scientists tailored compounds to address all these limitations. Over the course of five-plus years, they designed analogs of rifabutin which would overcome the drug resistance. At the same time, their compounds would maintain potent on-target activity, and also exhibit favorable oral pharmacokinetics - all while eliminating unwanted interactions with other medications.
Two of all the compounds tested through in-vitro and in-vivo models stood out as being especially effective against M. abscessus. These next-generation rifamycins also show promise in treating other rapid-growing nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM), as well as against Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC), and TB.
The prevalence and spread of the NTM threat is still being studied by epidemiologists. High levels of some minerals and metals in environmental water supplies may increase the risk of NTM pulmonary infections in people with cystic fibrosis, the NIH reported in 2023 .
Dick credits global teamwork with bringing the work to its current state. The scientific journey started almost a decade ago at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, specifically citing Dinah Binte Aziz, Jian Liang Low, and Mu-Lu Wu. The early mechanists and drug discovery work was led by Uday Ganapathy, Ph.D., then a member of the Dick Lab at the CDI.
“This achievement is the result of a remarkable collaboration between academic investigators, students, and postdoctoral researchers at the CDI, Hackensack Meridian Health, and partner laboratories across the U.S., Europe and Asia,” said Dick last year.
Now these achievements are going to be taken to the next level, with the new BioVersys partnership, according to both parties.
According to BioVersys’ announcement dated March 31, 2026:
“BioVersys’ proprietary Ansamycin Chemistry platform has been developed through their research teams in Lille (France) and Basel (Switzerland) and has already produced several advanced, highly potent and orally bioavailable broad-spectrum anti-NTM lead candidates with in vitro and in vivo activity that are now jointly progressed towards candidate selection with Shionogi as part of the BV500 program.
“The addition of novel ansamycin chemistry and advanced lead molecules developed by the group of Dr. Thomas Dick and Dr. Véronique Dartois at HMH’s Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) in collaboration with their partner Dr. Courtney Aldrich at the University of Minnesota, further strengthens and is synergistic with BioVersys’ Ansamycin Chemistry platform and the pool of potently active orally bioavailable anti-NTM leads, while also allowing for development of additional antimicrobial agents.”
To learn more about Drs. Dick and Dartois, read profiles on what drives their scientific curiosity here and here .
Experimental study
Animals