At Spero we are privileged to be enrolling our pivotal study for SPR994, our oral antibiotic with the bacteria-killing power of an IV to treat patients with serious urinary tract infections. A frightening sign of our deteriorating antibiotic arsenal is the three million patients in the US alone whose infections do not respond to oral antibiotics used in past decades; if these patients are hospitalized they can cost an average of $4,000 more to treat than if an effective oral agent were available. In this era of a value conscious health care system, there are few interventions that are more cost-effective than getting patients out of the hospital or keeping them out. SPR994 could provide the tool to make this happen.
This blog was written by Ankit Mahadevia, CEO and founder of Spero Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC.
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Gary Pisano’s recent Harvard Business Review piece, The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures, beautifully frames up how innovative corporate environments are frequently misunderstood. Innovative startups aren’t just about being cool and nimble, having beer taps in the kitchen, or an endless bounty of swag. Pisano sums up the harder, harsher reality of truly innovative environments: “These cultures are not all fun and games.”
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Vertex Pharmaceuticals is paying $70 million upfront to work with Kymera Therapeutics on the discovery of drugs that drive the elimination of disease-causing proteins. The early-stage deal features more than $1 billion in milestones tied to the success of six programs.
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Translation of well validated biology into therapeutics remains one of the biggest challenges of modern drug development, in many cases due to lack of appropriate technologies to drug well credentialed biological targets. Examples in this category include driver oncogenes such as MYC, b-catenin and STAT3; catalytically active scaffolding kinases such as IRAK4 and RIPK’s or proteins whose accumulation is associated with well-established pathology such as alpha-synuclein in Parkinsons’s Disease or Tau in dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.
This blog was written by Nello Mainolfi, CSO and co-founder of Kymera Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC.
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The IQVIA Institute released a data-rich report in April 2019 on the state of clinical R&D in the US pharmaceutical industry titled “The Changing Landscape of Research and Development: Innovation, Drivers of Change, and Evolution of Clinical Trial Productivity”. The report is a fascinating deep-dive into lots of data cuts around what’s going on.
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