R&D Insight

Non-traditional antibiotics: A pipeline review and an analysis of key development challenges

Dear All, Non-traditional alternatives to antibiotics have excited a lot of interest in the past few years but we’ve seen relatively few of these progress in a meaningful way (go here for Pew’s recent survey of the development landscape). Providing insights into the challenges of this area, two valuable and complementary articles on non-traditional antibiotics have recently

6 August 2019 No Comments

Stewardship & Access Guide from CARB-X, Wellcome, and partners: Analysis, video chat

Dear All, Novel antibacterial agents, vaccines, and diagnostics will do little if they are not widely available and used responsibly. CDDEP’s recent report entitled “The State of the World’s Antibiotics in 2021” makes this very clear: “… more people in LMICs (low-middle-income countries) die from lack of access to antimicrobials than from resistant infection.” Hence, CARB-X has

22 March 2021 No Comments

FDA AdComm #2 on inhaled ciprofloxacin (11 Jan 2018); IMI Call for AMR diagnostics (28 Feb 2018 deadline)

Dear All: Two new events on the near-term horizon. First, FDA has announced an Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee for 11 Jan 2018 (and materials from the meeting can now be found here). Per the FR notice, this AMDAC will cover Aradigm’s inhaled ciprofloxacin for non-CF bronchiectasis and is almost certainly a discussion of the results Aradigm’s ORBIT-3

3 December 2017 No Comments

CARB-X Novel Chemistry for AMR Challenge

Dear All, Happy New Year! As a great start for January, Team CARB-X have announced (i) that they will have two funding calls during 2026 (April and then Q4) and (ii) that a theme focused on finding new chemical scaffolds will be part of both calls. Applications to these target-based therapeutics funding calls will require defined chemistry

8 January 2026 No Comments

Impact of PASTEUR: 9.9m lives saved, ROI of 125:1

Dear All (and with thanks to Kevin Outterson for being lead author on this newsletter), (wonkish alert on this one … refresh your coffee and dig in!) Bonnifield and Towse of the Center for Global Development have released a blog post and a paper estimating the potential impact of the PASTEUR Act. Here’s what you need:

29 November 2022 No Comments

Extending STEDI to diagnostics: STRIDES

Dear All (and with thanks to Betsy Trainor for co-authoring), The idea of the STEDI values of an antibiotic (its fire extinguisher-like values) comes up often. As a reminder, the STEDI values are Spectrum, Transmission, Enablement, Diversity, and Insurance. As a good example, consider Enablement: knowing that an antibiotic exists as a backup makes safe

18 June 2025 No Comments

FDA analysis of 40-years of antibacterial development: Dheman et al.

Dear All (and with thanks to Kevin Outterson for co-authoring this newsletter), Just out in CID is a paper in which FDA analyzes trends in antibacterial development from 1980-2019. To fully appreciate this paper, you need to look both at it and three other papers: FDA’s paper (https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa859): Dheman N, Mahoney N, Cox EM, Farley

30 June 2020 No Comments

Antibacterial R&D is very hard! Two great pipeline reviews + an Industry-level view

Dear All (and with thanks to Stephan Harbarth for co-authoring this newsletter), A new review by Ursula Theuretzbacher and colleagues from GARDP provides an opportunity to (i) discuss the preclinical antibacterial pipeline (the new paper), (ii) remind you of a recent review of the Gram-negative clinical pipeline, and (iii) share an excellent Industry-level perspective on

4 April 2025 No Comments

Mirror Bacteria: An AMR threat of unprecedented magnitude

Dear All (wonkish but stick with it … I’m going to try very hard to de-wonk it; addendum: see also the follow-up newsletters, most recently on 22 Dec 2025), In an absolutely terrifying paper and technical report in today’s issue of Science, we are introduced in detail to the concept of “mirror” bacteria in which

12 December 2024 No Comments

The threat of mirror bacteria: Ongoing conversations (July 2025)

Dear All (addendum: see also the 22 Dec 2025 follow-up newsletter), I wrote in a 12 Dec 2024 newsletter (“Mirror Bacteria: An AMR threat of unprecedented magnitude”) about the really disturbing possible threat from creation of “mirror” bacteria in which all chiral elements of the bacterium are replaced by their enantiomeric counterparts. Such bacteria are predicted to

18 July 2025 No Comments

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