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

SpringWorks and Satsuma — both biotech spinouts that have closed B rounds in April — are loading up with IPO cash to boost their respective late-stage plans.
SpringWorks

Bain-backed SpringWorks is the better-known company of the two, and it’s gunning for a larger windfall of $115 million to add to $228 million from previous financings. In the process, the Stamford, CT-based team is also drawing the curtains on the partnerships it has in mind for the pair of assets it had initially licensed from Pfizer.

Data reveal that different racial and ethnic groups — by nature and/or nurture — can respond differently in terms of pharmacokinetics, efficacy, or safety to therapeutics, but this disparity is not necessarily accounted for in clinical trials. A fresh analysis of the last decade of US cancer drug approvals suggests the trend continues, cementing previous research that suggests oncology trials are woefully under-representative of the racial makeup of the real world.

Back in the spring of last year, Vanda Pharmaceuticals $VNDA served up a hot stew of mixed data for a slate of endpoints related to what they called clear evidence that their melatonin sleep drug Hetlioz (tasimelteon) could help millions of travelers suffering from jet lag.

Never mind that they couldn’t get a planned 90 people in the study, settling for 25 instead; Vanda CEO Mihael H. Polymeropoulos said they were building on a body of data to prove it would help jet-lagged patients looking for added sleep benefits. And that, they added, would be worth a major upgrade from the agency as they sought to tackle a big market.

Earlier this year, an executive from Juvenescence-backed AgeX predicted the field of longevity will eventually “dwarf the dotcom boom.” Greg Bailey, the UK-based anti-aging biotech’s CEO, certainly hopes so.

On Monday, Juvenescence completed its $100 million Series B round of financing. The company is backed by British billionaire Jim Mellon — who wrote his 400-page guide to investing in the field of longevity shortly after launching the company in 2017. Bailey, who served as a board director for seven years at Medivation before Pfizer swallowed the biotech for $14 billion, is joined by Declan Doogan, an industry veteran with stints at Pfizer $PFE and Amarin $AMRN.

Another big drug approval came through on Friday afternoon as the FDA OK’d AbbVie’s upadacitinib — an oral JAK1 inhibitor that is hitting the rheumatoid arthritis market with a black box warning of serious malignancies, infections and thrombosis reflecting fears associated with the class.

It will be sold as Rinvoq — at a wholesale price of $59,000 a year — and will likely soon face competition from a drug that AbbVie once controlled, and spurned. Reuters reports that a 4-week supply of Humira, by comparison, is $5,174, adding up to about $67,000 a year.