You Too, Achaogen?

I just learned that Achaogen will lay off 80 people in their research and development areas to save money. Achaogen earned its first approval, in the US, of plazomicin, an aminoglycoside antibiotic active against resistant Gram-negative pathogens.  It will probably receive approval in Europe soon. With this success, it is downsizing to focus on commercial success and sacrificing chances of following up with additional products for the antibiotic pipeline from its own R&D efforts. In their press release, the clearly cite the unfavorable commercial environment for new antibiotics as a justification for their decision.  They will continue to purse their efforts to develop a new aminoglycoside and a new, orally available B-lactam-B-lactamase inhibitor. 

Recent experience shows that all segments of the private antibiotic R&D sector are now failing. In rapid succession we have lost antibiotic research efforts in small companies like Achaogen, mid-size companies like the Medicines Company and Allergan and large companies like Novartis. All this, as Achaogen clearly notes, is due to the antibiotic market failure and society’s failure to address the problem. There is no reason to expect that Achaogen will be the last company to drop out under these circumstances. 

This will further erode investor confidence.  Any dream that many harbor of establishing public-private partnerships to further research and development of new antibiotics is crashing against the rocks of the lack of private investor interest in the current climate. 

We need to be asking our leaders (and I use the term with caution) in government what their plan is for staving off disaster. In the US, as we speak, the REVAMP bill that would provide a powerful antidote to the poisonous antibiotic market situation is languishing for lack of support in Congress.  In Europe, there is still a great deal of talk and no action. Are we waiting for the next epidemic of MRSA or VRE comes along?  Are we going to sit on our thumbs until fully resistant Gram-negative bacteria become dominant in our hospitals and nursing homes? 

A recent study from the US National Institutes of Health sounds yet another warning bell. They looked for difficult to treat cases of Gram-negative blood stream infections between 2009 and 2013.  Difficult to treat was defined as resistant to all or most of the commonly used first line antibiotics. They found that only 1% of all such infections fell into that category.  But before you accuse me of crying wolf, you need to read further. Infections caused by E. coli were the most common and the least likely to be resistant.  But infections caused by hospital and long term care pathogens like Klebsiella, Enterobacter, Acinetobacter and Pseudomonas were much more likely to be resistant. Over 18% of Acinetobacter infections were “difficult to treat.” The mortality for difficult to treat infections was 20% higher than that for more susceptible infections. While there are limitations to this retrospective study, it should remind us that without a pipeline of new antibiotics to treat resistant infections, we will continue to lose increasing numbers of patients and to spend more and more of our health care dollar trying to treat these patients rather than having the tools available to treat them effectively from the start. 

There is no excuse to further delay action to deal with the broken antibiotic marketplace and the resulting desultory state of our antibiotic pipeline.