This archive report was first published on 25 December 2019.
Published on December 25, 2019, a crisis looms in the antibiotics industry as two major pharmaceutical companies, Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals and Melinta Therapeutics, struggle to stay afloat.
Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals, based in Watertown, Massachusetts, has been working on Xerava, an antibiotic that can vanquish resistant germs like MRSA and CRE, a resistant bacteria that kills 13,000 people a year. However, the company has struggled to get hospitals to embrace the drug, which took more than a decade to discover and bring to market.
‘Unlike expensive new cancer drugs that extend survival by three-to-six months, antibiotics like ours truly save a patient’s life,’ said Larry Edwards, chief executive of Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals. ‘It’s frustrating.’
As a result, Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals has been forced to trim costs, shuttering its labs, laying off 40 scientists, and scuttling plans to move forward on three other promising antibiotics. The company’s stock price has been hovering around $2, down from nearly $40 a year ago.
Meanwhile, Melinta Therapeutics, based in Morristown, New Jersey, is facing even grimmer prospects. Last month, the company’s stock price dropped 45 percent after executives issued a warning about the company’s long-term prospects. Melinta makes four antibiotics, including Baxdela, which recently received FDA approval to treat the kind of drug-resistant pneumonia that often kills hospitalized patients.
‘These drugs are my babies, and they are so urgently needed,’ said Jennifer Sanfilippo, Melinta’s interim chief executive. She was hoping a sale or merger would buy the company more time to raise awareness about the antibiotics’ value among hospital pharmacists and increase sales.
The development of new antibiotics is a challenging and costly process. Only two new classes of antibiotics have been introduced in the last 20 years, and the diminishing financial returns have driven most companies from the market. In the 1980s, there were 18 major pharmaceutical companies developing new antibiotics; today there are three.
‘The science is hard, really hard,’ said Dr. David Shlaes, a former vice president at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and a board member of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, a nonprofit advocacy organization. ‘And reducing the number of people who work on it by abandoning antibiotic R&D is not going to get us anywhere.’
