Achao­gen has just about wrapped up its go­ing-out-of-busi­ness sale, with a small group of buy­ers from around the globe pick­ing up its main an­tibi­ot­ic as­sets for a song. And they’re just one short tele­phone auc­tion away from sell­ing their last re­main­ing clin­i­cal pro­gram.

Bank­rupt and run­ning out of cash $AKAO af­ter go­ing $186 mil­lion in the red last year, the biotech has now sold off the glob­al rights to Zem­dri (pla­zomicin for mul­tidrug-re­sis­tant, gram-neg­a­tive pathogens) along with its lab equip­ment for just $16 mil­lion. Her­itage Glob­al Part­ners got the lab equip­ment. Cipla USA got all glob­al rights to Zem­dri out­side of Chi­na, while QiLu An­tibi­otics Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal bagged the roy­al­ty-free Chi­na rights. 

This is an an­tibi­ot­ic that Leerink once con­fi­dent­ly pre­dict­ed would reap $500 mil­lion a year in peak sales. In the heady days of spring, 2017, its stock reached a peak price of $27 a share. It’s vir­tu­al­ly worth­less now. The dra­mat­ic fall from mar­ket grace came as the FDA re­ject­ed the biotech’s pitch to use their an­tibi­ot­ic against blood­stream in­fec­tions, lim­it­ing the OK to drug-re­sis­tant uri­nary tract in­fec­tions while adding a black box warn­ing on safe­ty.

Once on the mar­ket, the an­a­lysts found that hos­pi­tals al­ready had a fa­vorite brand to turn to, and lit­tle Achao­gen made lit­tle head­way on its own. In founder­ing, the biotech of­fered one of the more re­cent cau­tion­ary ex­am­ples of the haz­ards of an­tibi­ot­ic de­vel­op­ment. In a field dom­i­nat­ed by gener­ics, star­tups are find­ing their way blocked by es­tab­lished prod­ucts, with lit­tle prospect for a turn­around, even though the threat of drug-re­sis­tant bac­te­ria grows with every pass­ing year.

In­vestors have not ig­nored the im­pli­ca­tions for the rest of the tiny op­er­a­tors in the field, as most of Big Phar­ma shuns the space.

Any­one in­ter­est­ed in buy­ing Achao­gen’s last as­set — the C-Scape pro­gram — can di­al in for their last sale on Mon­day, June 10.

Their last 10-K notes that C-Scape is be­ing de­vel­oped for “cU­TI, in­clud­ing pyelonephri­tis, caused by ES­BL-pro­duc­ing En­ter­obac­te­ri­aceae. C-Scape is a b-lac­tam/b-lac­ta­mase in­hibitor com­bi­na­tion com­prised of ceftibuten, an ap­proved third gen­er­a­tion cephalosporin, and clavu­lanate, an ap­proved b-lac­ta­mase in­hibitor. The FDA award­ed Qual­i­fied In­fec­tious Dis­ease Prod­uct (QIDP) sta­tus to C-Scape for the treat­ment of cU­TI in 2017. QIDP sta­tus pro­vides in­cen­tives for the de­vel­op­ment of new an­tibi­otics, in­clud­ing pri­or­i­ty re­view and an ex­ten­sion by an ad­di­tion­al five years of any ex­ist­ing non-patent mar­ket ex­clu­siv­i­ty the prod­uct may be award­ed up­on ap­proval. Our C-Scape pro­gram is fund­ed in part by a con­tract with BAR­DA for up to $18.0 mil­lion, of which $12.0 mil­lion is com­mit­ted.”

What’s it worth on the mar­ket?

Im­age: Shut­ter­stock

J&J has zeroed in on a Covid-19 vaccine candidate that it hopes to begin testing in humans by September this year — with the extraordinary goal of getting it ready for emergency use in early 2021. And together with BARDA, it’s committing $1 billion to make it happen.

That kind of accelerated timeline would fall on the fast side of NIAID director Anthony Fauci’s well-publicized prediction that it would be another 12 to 18 months before a vaccine can be available for public use. A Phase I trial of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine began two weeks ago, and both the biotech and fellow mRNA player CureVac have discussed similar, if not even faster, timelines for emergency use among healthcare workers.

Using lab-grown proteins that are engineered to mimic the architecture of viruses to induce an immune response, VBI Vaccines is joining the hunt for a coronavirus vaccine — harnessing technology that has initially been proved safe in early trials as a prophylactic for cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection.

Unlike the raft of the companies in the Covid-19 vaccine race — including Moderna, CureVac and J&J — VBI is taking a pan-coronavirus approach, by developing a vaccine that will encompass Covid-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

VCs love few things more than a proven executive team when it comes to launching a new company. And now a group of A-listers has turned to a pair of top execs out of AveXis to steer the latest gene therapy player into the clinic.

The biotech is Waltham, MA-based Affinia and the two execs are Sean Nolan and Rick Modi — the former CEO and CBO respectively of AveXis, the gene therapy pioneer that fetched $8.7 billion in a sale to Novartis. Nolan has now taken the chairman’s role at Affinia while Modi moves up to the CEO post at the company.

When Pieter van der Meer started raising the capital for Gilde Healthcare’s fifth fund in the waning months of 2019, he had his eyes on a different chain of events that could change the healthcare system and perhaps even play to his firm’s advantage: The US presidential election.

Since raising their third fund in 2011, the 34-year-old Dutch firm had focused on value-based care. They chose late-stage biotechs that came up with new devices and delivery systems for de-risked established compounds, and when they chose preclinical biotechs, they spoke with potential pharma partners, payers and regulators to ask where and at what prices the drug made sense. As the Democratic primary became a contest over how to lower healthcare costs, it looked like a strategy that could pay off.