What’s a venture capital fund to do with a promising biotech with good science that’s taken a little longer to develop than everyone would have hoped?

Recapitalize the company, pump some cash in, bring in new management, and change the name while you’re at it.

Last November, Vatera Healthcare Partners took control of Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, leading a $67.5 million investment round that also included Warburg Pincus, ABS Ventures and Vox Equity Partners.

As the new majority owner, Vatera has made major changes, including installing new management and changing the company’s name to Melinta Therapeutics Inc. But the science, based on the structure of the ribosome determined by Rib-X’s founders, hasn’t changed.

“Vatera is concentrated on a half a dozen investments unlike many VCs that have 10, 20, 30 smaller, passive investments. We’re much more actively involved in trying to support management teams,” Kevin Ferro CEO of Vatera told BioWorld Insight.

Most recently, Vatera had success developing Pearl Therapeutics Inc. before the Redwood City, Calif.-based company was snatched up by Astrazeneca plc, of London, for $560 million up front and the potential for $590 million more from development, regulatory and sales milestones. (See BioWorld Today, June 11, 2013.)

New Haven, Conn.-based Melinta’s lead compound delafloxacin is in Phase III development for acute bacterial skin and skin structure infections (ABSSSI), including those caused by the hard-to-treat methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

The antibiotic, which was in-licensed from Japan-based Wakunaga Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., and isn’t part of Rib-X’s discovery platform, has a broad spectrum with the ability to treat both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria.

Melinta plans to test delafloxacin in other undisclosed indications that could lead to a faster approval than ABSSSI because smaller clinical trials would be required.

“It’s a pipeline in a drug,” Melinta’s CEO Mary Szela told BioWorld Insight. “If you look at older antibiotics, the ones that became billion-dollar drugs had the capability to cross into different indications.”

Of course, Melinta does have a pipeline beyond delafloxacin, albeit an early stage one. Szela and Ferro are most excited about the RX-04 program based on the structure of the ribosome, pioneered by Rib-X’s founders. The program has developed multiple drug candidates designed to bind to a conserved region in the bacterial ribosome that isn’t targeted by any other marketed antibiotics.

The efficacy of antibiotics tends to translate well from animal models to humans because the drugs act directly on the microbe rather than the host organism. In preclinical tests, drugs from the RX-04 program have shown efficacy against multi-drug resistant gram-negative and gram-positive strains of bacteria that cause sepsis, skin and lung infections and complicated urinary tract infections.

At this point, with a de novo class of drugs, Melinta is mostly concerned with unknown safety issues for the preclinical compounds. But with mortality rates above 50 percent for some types of bacterial infections, the drugs don’t have to be perfectly clean to gain regulatory approval and market acceptance. Szela likens the antibiotics to an oncology platform where regulators will “tolerate some safety issues because mortality rates are so high.”

Melinta plans to file an investigational new drug application for compounds in the RX-04 program in the third quarter of next year.