The University of Oxford has started recruiting for a Phase 1/2 human challenge trial of a paratyphoid vaccine candidate, the university announced last week. The University of Maryland School of Medicine developed the oral candidate (CVD 1902) to protect against Salmonella Paratyphi infection, per the press release.
An Oxford researcher commented that a licensed paratyphoid vaccine is “desperately needed” due to “increasing antibiotic resistance.”
Venatorx Pharmaceuticals’ cefepime-taniborbactam was superior to standard of care meropenem for treating complicated urinary tract infections in Phase 3 trials, the Pennsylvania-based company announced last week.
The investigational antibiotic—which targets carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales and P. aeruginosa—generated bacterial eradication in 70% of participants compared to 58% treated with meropene, and cefepime-taniborbactam’s superiority was maintained through a late follow-up,…
Centauri Therapeutics has raised over $32.6 million in Series A financing to support the development of novel antibacterial candidates for difficult-to-treat infections, the company announced Wednesday. Investors in the round include Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Evotec and Novo Holdings REPAIR Impact Fund.
The London-based biotech won CARB-X backing in 2020 for its ABX01 dual-acting immunotherapy to treat serious infections caused by Gram-negative pathogens (including drug-…
Bugworks Research has secured $18 million in Series B financing, the biopharma announced Wednesday. The funds will support the clinical development of BWC0977, the India-based company’s novel broad-spectrum antibiotic against multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria, among other projects.
Currently in Phase 1, BWC0977 has had CARB-X backing since 2017.
Seres Therapeutics’ oral microbiome treatment for C. difficile infections (CDI) proved superior to placebo in reducing CDI recurrence, according to Phase 3 data published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Touting the “first-ever positive pivotal clinical results for a targeted microbiome drug,” the Massachusetts-based company said in a press release it would finalize its U.S. FDA Biologics License Application for SER-109 in mid-2022.
The treatment boasts FDA…
The University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) last week released what it described as “the first comprehensive assessment” of the global burden of antimicrobial resistance. Published in The Lancet, the study finds AMR “a leading cause of death around the world, with the highest burdens in low-resource settings.”
IHME said AMR was directly responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths in 2019—far more than HIV/AIDS or malaria—while approximately 4.…
Promising C. difficile drug ridinilazole has failed in Phase 3, CARB-X grantee Summit Therapeutics announced Monday.
The Massachusetts-based company said the study showed that the investigational drug resulted in a higher observed Sustained Clinical Response rate than current standard-of-care vancomycin “but did not meet the study’s primary endpoint for superiority.”
The company did see a “meaningful reduction in recurrence,” however, which Summit Therapeutics linked to the…
The Access to Medicine (AtM) Foundation has released its 2021 antimicrobial resistance benchmark report evaluating 17 of the industry’s most active players in the AMR space.
GSK maintained its lead among multinational corporations, although Pfizer leaped from sixth to a close second place after making “significant strides” in stewardship, waste management, drug access, R&D and data sharing. The AtM Foundation praised Pfizer as the only major multinational making its raw data…
What role can vaccines play in combatting antimicrobial resistance? A public-private partnership seeks to answer that question through an open-source, web-based analytic platform, Germany’s European Vaccine Initiative (EVI) announced last week.
The PrIMAVeRa project—coordinated by EVI and backed by $10.3 million from the Brussels-based Innovative Medicines Initiative—joins GSK, Janssen and Pfizer with 16 academic and SME partners across the E.U., Russia and the U.K.
The five-year…
Venatorx Pharmaceuticals announced Monday that it has entered into a licensing agreement with Roche to advance drug treatments for infections caused by carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales (CRE) bacteria.
Boston University-led nonprofit CARB-X gave the Pennsylvania-based company $15 million between 2019 and 2020 to develop a new class of oral antibiotics to treat infections caused by multidrug-resistant N. gonorrhoeae.