Discovery is a bench activity. Everything else follows from what happens there.
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Zobo Biosciences is a discovery-stage bioscience company. We search living material for novel bioactive compounds — using a method that produced most of the anti-infective medicines still in clinical use, run on instruments that did not exist when the field set it aside.
Discovery is a bench activity. Everything else follows from what happens there.
Who we are
Zobo Biosciences is a bioscience research company built around a single activity: finding molecules that do something useful, and proving that they do it.
We work at the front end of the discovery chain — the part where a compound is isolated from biological material, identified, and tested against living systems, long before anyone decides what product it might eventually become.
Our founding science comes out of doctoral research in microbiology on naturally occurring antimicrobial compounds. That work is the origin of both our methods and our judgement about where to look. It is not licensed in from a third party.
We are based in Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra. Working in India is a scientific decision as much as a practical one: the biological material we screen is local, the cost of running experiments here allows us to run far more of them, and the resistance burden our anti-infective work addresses is heaviest in this region.
Explore
The chemical case for searching living material rather than synthetic libraries, and what changed to make it viable again.
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Four areas of unmet need, described at the level of the biological problem rather than the compound.
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Activity-guided isolation, dereplication and analytical confirmation — the experimental discipline behind every result.
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Antimicrobial resistance is not a forecast. It is a present clinical failure, concentrated in the region we work from. The figures below are published and public, and they are the reason a company like ours exists.
deaths from antibiotic-resistant infections forecast between 2025 and 2050 — roughly three every minute.
deaths per year directly attributable to resistance by 2050, an increase of around 70% on 2022.
growth in reported clinical Candida auris cases in the US, from 1,471 in 2021 to 6,304 in 2024.
The same pattern is repeating in fungal disease. The WHO published its first Fungal Priority Pathogens List in 2022, and azole-resistant dermatophytes are now widespread across India, where first-line topical treatment routinely fails. New chemistry is needed, and it is needed here first.
Get in touch
We are open to conversations with research collaborators, laboratories, clinicians, formulators and organisations working in adjacent areas. If you want detail beyond what is published here, tell us what you are working on and we will find the right level to talk at.