Rising antimicrobial resistance becomes a very real public health threat.

Cubist exec: Challenges mount in antibiotics discovery

By Emily Mullin

Comment  |  Forward  |  Twitter  |  Facebook  |  LinkedIn

Big Pharma

Big Pharma has largely exited the antibiotics

 arena in the past several years, contributing to the dearth of products in the global pipeline as rising antimicrobial resistance becomes a very real public health threat.

Now, just a few companies--among them, Cubist Pharmaceuticals ($CBST

)--remain in the antibiotics space. The Lexington, MA-based company in June won FDA approval for Sivextro, an antibacterial drug to treat a range of skin infections, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA

). Now it's on the way to its second drug approval of the year with the combination antibiotic ceftolozane/tazobactam, designed to fight complicated urinary tract and intra-abdominal infections.

With several other candidates in the pipeline, Cubist is succeeding in a field that others have fled. FierceBiotechResearch talked to Ronald Farquhar, senior vice president of discovery and pharmaceutical sciences at Cubist, about the unique preclinical challenges that developing antibiotics presents.

Ronald Farquhar, senior vice president of discovery and pharmaceutical sciences at Cubist

What are some of the scientific difficulties involved in preclinical antibiotics research for the industry at large?

Generally, the dual challenges of preclinical antibiotics research are being able to help infected patients eradicate multidrug-resistant bacteria while doing so in a safe manner. Typically, the required effective dose of an antibiotic may be up to 1 g to 2 g per day, which is at least 10 to 100 times the dose at which other human (nonantibacterial) therapeutics are administered, and this represents a major hurdle in avoiding off-target effects. This explains the reason why, generally speaking, attrition rates for preclinical antibiotic molecules are high. Conversely, once antibiotics have been shown to be effective in preclinical infection models and once rigorous safety studies have been completed, survival through the development process can be greater than for other drug types in other areas of biopharmaceutical development.

Read more from FierceBiotechResearch >>

-- Emily Mullin (email | Twitter

)