Monday, December 30, 2019

Tough times at antibiotics companies

Via Twitter, this New York Times article on antibiotics firms: 
...“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 the company that makes Xerava, Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals. “It’s frustrating.” 
Tetraphase, based in Watertown, Mass., has struggled to get hospitals to embrace Xerava, which took more than a decade to discover and bring to market, even though the drug can vanquish resistant germs like MRSA and CRE, a group of resistant bacteria that kills 13,000 people a year. 
Tetraphase’s stock price has been hovering around $2, down from nearly $40 a year ago. To trim costs, Mr. Edwards recently shuttered the company’s labs, laid off some 40 scientists and scuttled plans to move forward on three other promising antibiotics....
I'm ready to declare market failure on antibiotics, and move both R&D, manufacture and stockpiling to the government, sigh... 

1 comment:

  1. I'm shocked to see an all time high of Melinta shares at 1150 ish just 4 years ago to now bankrupt at like 60 cents.

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