Enforcement Report - Week of April 24, 2019
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.”
Warp Drive was created in 2012 by a strategic partnership with Sanofi and financing from Third Rock Ventures and Greylock Partners. They infused the company with $125 million, and gave Sanofi an option to buy the company if its microbial genome-focused drug discovery focus hit certain milestones. In January 2016, Sanofi revised the agreement, and dropped its acquisition option, but licensed four programs for up to $750 million made up of an upfront fee, milestone payments, and research funding.
The collaboration, a biotech named Warp Drive Bio, said it has delivered a few dozen compounds to Sanofi, and the French drug company hopes to turn them into antibiotics for fighting drug-resistant infections, like flesh-eating bacteria.