There’s more bad news for the an­tibi­otics R&D field Thurs­day evening.

Ken Hillan

A few weeks af­ter the FDA green-light­ed Achao­gen’s $AKAO an­tibi­ot­ic Zem­dri (pla­zomicin) for uri­nary tract in­fec­tions but shunt­ed aside their ap­pli­ca­tion on blood­stream in­fec­tions, the biotech is lay­ing off rank-and-file re­searchers and let­ting go its top re­search ex­ecs.

Al­to­geth­er the com­pa­ny says it is cut­ting 80 jobs — 28% of the staff — as it chops spend­ing on ear­ly-stage re­search and de­vel­op­ment, tech­ni­cal op­er­a­tions and gen­er­al and ad­min­is­tra­tive ex­pens­es.

Lee Swem

Ken Hillan, pres­i­dent R&D, will leave in mid-Oc­to­ber, while CSO Lee Swem will de­part a few weeks ear­li­er.

Re­search will be nar­rowed to fo­cus on C-Scape, an oral be­ta-lac­tam/be­ta-lac­ta­mase in­hibitor com­bi­na­tion, and new amino­gly­co­side an­tibi­otics, which can count on some non-di­lu­tive fund­ing com­mit­ments to con­tin­ue the work. The main task at Achao­gen will be com­mer­cial­iz­ing their ap­proved prod­uct while hunt­ing a Eu­ro­pean OK to ex­pand that work.

For the past 10 years pub­lic health of­fi­cials have been rais­ing a hue and cry for new an­tibi­otics as old stan­dards strug­gle against a ris­ing tide of drug re­sis­tance. But the bulk of the need can still be met with cheap stand­by ther­a­pies, mak­ing it hard to prof­it by them. As a re­sult, Big Phar­ma bowed out large­ly, un­der­scored by No­var­tis’ re­cent de­ci­sion to join the ex­o­dus out of the field. As­traZeneca and oth­ers had done it years ago.

Fenlai Tan still gets chills thinking about the darkest day of his life.

Three out of eight lung cancer patients who received a tyrosine kinase inhibitor developed by his company, Betta Pharma, died in the span of a month. Tan, the chief medical officer, was summoned to Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where the head of the clinical trial department told him that the trial investigators would be conducting an autopsy to see if the patients had died of the disease — they were all very sick by the time they enrolled — or of interstitial lung disease, a deadly side effect tied to the TKI class that’s been reported in Japan.

After flopping a test in Covid-19 earlier this year, Angion’s lead organ damage drug has now hit the skids again in kidney transplant patients.

Angion and partner Vifor Pharma’s ANG-3777 failed to beat out placebo in terms of improving eGFR, a measure of kidney function, in patients who had received a deceased donor kidney transplant and were at high risk of developing what is known as delayed graft function, according to Phase III results released Tuesday.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.