Maud Eijkenboom’s journey started with her son, Jonathan Barker. His health challenges were a spark for her to start looking for an alternative solution to antibiotic resistance. Jonathan, who is only 22, has recently won a ten-year battle with Lyme disease. He picked up this disease after a single tick bite while stationed in Europe. The infection left him with complex infections and a severe, chronic, antibiotic-resistant condition that turned his world upside down.
Jonathan’s predicament first appeared as early as age 12. He began fainting on a frequent basis and would sometimes fall asleep without being awakened. Maud, his mother, was hell-bent on getting answers. She was looking for a more effective approach to fighting an ever-increasing wave of dangerous pathogens. That compelled her to found Lixa, a Perth-based biotech company, in 2021. Maud has already done tremendously important work in her field. Her primary goal is to create innovative approaches to fighting AMR.
Since introducing their idea to the world, Lixa has received international recognition and support for their unique approach to solving antibiotic resistance. The Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Drug Development Partnership (GARDP) is a not-for-profit global health organisation. It took them ten months of carefully reviewing Lixa’s clinical data before they made the decision to fund the company. Maud emphasizes the uniqueness of their research, stating that “Lixa’s compounds represent an unconventional new approach to AMR treatment.”
Despite her son’s struggles, Maud remains optimistic about Jonathan’s progress. “He is doing so much better now,” she said, noting that he just got his first job a few months ago. This undoing has immense impact on Jonathan, who lost years of schooling due to his medical complications. “It took 10 years for him to recover. He didn’t have any schooling, no high school, because he was asleep,” Maud reflected.
These realities provide a challenging set of circumstances. The biggest sticking point is that so far, scientists have been unable to identify the Lyme disease-inducing bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi in Australian ticks. This has fueled fears regarding the spread of Lyme disease and the demand for better treatment solutions. As you may have recently read, the current efforts on producing new antibiotics are proving to be insufficient to stay even with viruses and bacteria that are constantly changing.
Dr. Maud Eijkenboom expressed her frustration at the slow progress of traditional antibiotic development: “Because we couldn’t help Jonathan for a long time, we did a lot of research.” In her opinion, next-generation novel approaches are critical if we hope to get ahead of the AMR crisis. To counteract these issues, Lixa’s research is hinged on identifying “unconventional” approaches with the ability to restore efficacy of existing but older medications.
James Graham, a member of GARDP’s governing board, stressed how Lixa’s work is crucial in fighting AMR. “We’ve spent nearly $100 million getting this new class of antibiotics into a late-stage phase three trial,” he noted. He said that as soon as they finish up phase three trials, they’ll be going on to market application submission. This process alone can be several months to close to a year.
Maud’s dedication to addressing AMR comes from her personal experiences and the real-world examples she has seen. “You look around, and resistance and chronic conditions are everywhere,” she remarked. She pointed out that the impact of AMR is often overlooked: “When we count the impact of AMR, we count the people who die, but we don’t count the people who are debilitated, who can’t take part in a normal life.”
Through her efforts with Lixa, Maud hopes to change the narrative around antibiotic resistance and provide solutions for those affected by it. She hopes to see a day when the older, underutilized antibiotics can be brought back into the fold to help stave off resistant strains of bacteria. “They go from a resistant state to a sensitive state, and suddenly the oldest antibiotics—or biocides or surfactants or whatever detergents you want to use—can work again as they used to,” she explained.
