A new antibiotic by Entasis Therapeutics has bested an existing therapy against a pathogen deemed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to be an urgent threat during a phase 3 clinical trial.nThe Zai Lab-partnered drug, called SUL-DUR, will now be headed for an initial FDA filing in mid-2022, Entasis said in a Monday statement.
SHANGHAI, Sept. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Everest Medicines (HKEX 1952.HK), a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing transformative pharmaceutical products that address critical unmet medical needs for patients in Asia, announced today that the Center for Drug Evaluation (CDE) of the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) of the People's Republic of China has approved the investigational new drug (IND) application under Class One category for SPR206 (also known as EVER206), a novel, intravenous next-generation polymyxin product candidate in development for the treatment of multi-drug resistant (MDR) gram-negative bacterial infections.
Harnessing the power of the body’s immune system has already proven to be effective in treating cancer. Scientists at Lehigh University are now borrowing that idea to power up existing antibiotics’ ability to attack drug-resistant bacteria.
Already, doctors are seeing patients with resistant infections that respond to few or no existing treatment options. A particularly frightening development was the discovery earlier this year of a gene called mcr-1 for the first time in bacteria in a human in this country. It has subsequently been found in three other American patients and in two intestinal samples from pigs tested by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is of particular concern because according to the CDC, “the gene makes bacteria resistant to the antibiotic colistin, which is used as a last-resort drug to treat patients with multi-drug-resistant infections,” and it “exists on a plasmid, a small piece of DNA that is capable of moving from one bacterium to another, spreading antibiotic resistance among bacterial species.”
The last drug has fallen. Bacteria carrying a gene that allows them to resist polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort for some kinds of infection, have been found in Denmark and China, prompting a global search for the gene.