In an­oth­er set­back for the be­lea­guered an­tibi­otics field, Nabri­va Ther­a­peu­tics says the FDA re­ject­ed its fos­fomycin for com­pli­cat­ed uri­nary tract in­fec­tions.

Ted Schroed­er

Im­por­tant­ly, the biotech says, reg­u­la­tors are not ask­ing for any new clin­i­cal or safe­ty da­ta. The com­plete re­sponse let­ter cen­ters around “is­sues re­lat­ed to fa­cil­i­ty in­spec­tions and man­u­fac­tur­ing de­fi­cien­cies at one of Nabri­va’s con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ers,” ac­cord­ing to a brief state­ment.

Over the next few weeks Nabri­va plans to re­quest a “Type A” meet­ing to dis­cuss the FDA’s find­ings. Shares $NR­BV are down 24% pre-mar­ket.

Across the in­dus­try, an­tibi­otics de­vel­op­ers and back­ers are suf­fer­ing from a new low in morale af­ter Achao­gen filed for bank­rupt­cy de­spite notch­ing an FDA ap­proval of its cU­TI drug, due to dis­ap­point­ing sales. And that fol­lows rounds of lay­offs at both Achao­gen and oth­er an­tibi­otics com­pa­nies like Melin­ta, with Big Phar­ma large­ly out of the pic­ture al­to­geth­er.

No­body would de­ny the ur­gent need for an­tibi­otics — just two days ago the UN is­sued an­oth­er re­port warn­ing of a “silent tsuna­mi” of an­timi­cro­bial re­sis­tance that threat­ens to kill 10 mil­lion peo­ple an­nu­al­ly by 2050 — but it’s in­creas­ing­ly hard to make a case for the R&D in­vest­ment when the prod­ucts are too niche to turn a prof­it in a world dom­i­nat­ed by gener­ics.

Nabri­va’s Con­tepo (IV fos­fomycin) is an old drug that’s been used out­side the US for over 45 years. Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny, it can treat a num­ber of Gram-neg­a­tive and Gram-pos­i­tive bac­te­ria in­fec­tions, ac­tive against many com­mon mul­ti-drug re­sis­tant strains.

It bagged the drug via an ac­qui­si­tion of Za­vante, whose CEO Ted Schroed­er then took the helm of the new en­ti­ty. Nabri­va’s in-house lead pro­gram for com­mu­ni­ty-ac­quired bac­te­r­i­al pneu­mo­nia, lefa­mulin, is al­so un­der re­view with a PDU­FA date in Au­gust.

After being struck by a rare disease as a healthy third year medical student, David Fajgenbaum began an arduous journey chasing his own cure. Amidst the hustle of this year’s JP Morgan conference, the digital trials platform Medable partnered with Endpoints Studio to share Dr. Fajgenbaum’s story with the drug development industry.

What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation between Medable CEO Dr. Michelle Longmire and Dr. Fajgenbaum, and it is full of lessons for biotech executives charged with bringing the next generation of medicines to patients.

Grifols once paid Aradigm $26 million for a stake in its inhaled antibiotics. But with Aradigm now in bankruptcy, the Spanish drugmaker is dishing out a final $3.2 million to buy it all.

The fire sale — which comes one year after Aradigm filed for Chapter 11 following a regulatory trifecta for disaster — will see Grifols obtain assets and IP to Apulmiq (formerly Pulmaquin and Linhaliq in Europe), Lipoquin and free ciprofloxacin. In addition to waiving its claims in the bankruptcy case, Grifols also agreed to milestone payments up to $3 million more upon any regulatory approvals.

Almost a year and a half after DBV Technologies pulled its peanut allergy immunotherapy patch from FDA review, the biotech will get their day in court. The FDA has scheduled an advisory committee hearing for May 15.

In the two-horse race to develop the first immunotherapy for peanut allergy, DBV had the early lead, filing an NDA for their patch in 2018. But on December 20 of that year, the company withdrew their application after, they said, meeting with regulators and determining they had not submitted “sufficient detail regarding data on manufacturing procedures and quality controls.” Aimmune filed their BLA 3 days later and won approval as the first immunotherapy for peanuts this month.

→ Days after Kura Oncology announced the departure of co-founder Antonio Gualberto, we finally know where he wound up. Eisai subsidiary H3 Biomedicine has recruited him as CMO to finding the right patients to its four clinical-stage small molecule assets hitting genomic drivers of cancer.

“Challenges of these and many other precision medicine approaches are on one hand technical — a need for robust and precise diagnostics — and on the other hand derived by the challenge to alter standard clinical practice in settings where patient screening, e.g. by tumor DNA sequencing, is not standard practice,” he wrote to Endpoints News on his way back to Boston from Eisai’s Tokyo offices. “Only compelling clinical activity can drive clinicians and pathologists to modify standard clinical practice.”