Biotech Values

[rfj1862]

GSK is swooping in on all these disttressed companies w drugs targeting infectious agents
they did spero late last year for an antibiotic for UTIs
I don't think either of these in and of themselves will be that big but who knows. They did sell over 500M of augmentin last year, and have an internal candidate they will file soon for UTIs and GC, so it is easy enough to add a couple other agents to detail for their primary care sales force
This is the low risk low return approach to pharma I guess

The whole antibiotics development paradigm is deeply problematic. Because new antibiotics are reserved for last-line use, no small drug developer has any hope of recouping their development investment in a reasonable amount of time. So many of these companies die on the vine and big pharma swoops in and gets the assets for far less than the development costs.

I had the misfortune of working for several of these companies, most recently Achaogen, which spent hundreds of millions to develop Zemdri, had an awesome medical/marketing/training machine put together, and then got killed when the FDA rejected their application for BSIs despite the fact that the data were, in my opinion, great, and particularly acceptable given the need for new antibiotics. They ended up selling everything for ~$15 million if I recall.

We need a new antibiotic development paradigm in which the government guarantees purchases of new/novel antibiotics or we're going to be in big trouble soon.

Investment thesis: Never ever invest in a company developing antibiotics or antifungals.