LONDON – Twenty-three pharma companies are joining forces in the AMR Action Fund and have raised $1 billion in new money for the clinical development of antibiotic drugs addressing the most resistant bacteria. Working with philanthropic backers, the fund aims to bring two to four new antibiotics through to approval by 2030.
In emergency situations, broad-spectrum antibiotics have their place. But their indiscriminate use has led to a resistance crisis that already kills tens of thousands of people annually in the U.S. alone.
Innovation is being rewarded under Medicare’s proposed fiscal 2021 Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) that was unveiled Monday. For starters, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing a new Medicare-severity-diagnosis related group (MS-DRG) specifically for CAR T therapies.
Recent seizures of fake medical products being marketed in the COVID-19 pandemic underscore the need to curb the growing international trade in counterfeit drugs that’s putting hundreds of thousands of lives at risk, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned this week.
Adding further evidence about the global threat of the increase of antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) infections and dearth of new antibiotics to treat those conditions, Thomas Cueni, chair of the AMR Industry Alliance, said the findings from the alliance’s newly released report are “a wake-up call” as they estimate current investments in AMR-relevant R&D are not enough to sustain a viable pipeline that will be needed to combat infectious diseases globally.
LONDON – Novo Repair has made new investments of $12 million, bringing the total invested by the specialist anti-infectives venture capital fund since it was set up two years ago to plug the gap in the early stage pipeline to $48 million.
The warning bells about the global threat of the rise of antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) infections and dearth of new antibiotics seem to have been ringing for several years now. However, the prospects of companies developing new antibiotics, buoyed by regulatory incentives and grant funding, should on the face of it be an attractive proposition for investors.
A new web-based tool allowing rapid in silico prediction of the ability of candidate antibiotics to accumulate in gram-negative bacteria should enable subsequent prioritization of new compounds for synthesis and further evaluation, U.S. researchers reported Nov. 18, 2019, in Nature Microbiology.
Shanghai-based Micurx Pharmaceuticals Inc. is preparing to file an NDA for its lead antibacterial candidate, contezolid, with China's National Medical Products Administration after results of a pivotal phase III trial there showed the drug providing comparable clinical cure rates to linezolid for complicated skin and soft tissue infections (cSSTI). Reduced hematologic toxicity for the tablet-based antibiotic vs. linezolid was also seen, highlighting one of contezolid's key advantages.
DUBLIN – Shares in Polyphor AG dropped as much as 21% Wednesday as the company shut down two phase III trials of its lead drug candidate, murepavadin, a first-in-class intravenous antibiotic in development for hospital-acquired and ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia (HABP/VABP).
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