Antibacterial Boom And Bust

Abstract

When David L. Pompliano joined GlaxoSmithKline in 2002 as head of biology for infectious diseases, the pharmaceutical company was ending a largely unsuccessful multiyear screening program to search for novel antibacterial drugs. The program started in the mid-1990s after the publication of the first bacterial genomes. GSK and other pharmaceutical companies thought these genomes held a trove of new targets for antibacterial drugs. The company examined 300 genes, ran 70 high-throughput screening campaigns, and screened between 300,000 and 500,000 compounds per campaign. After seven years, company scientists found just five drug leads. The success rate was about 20–25% lower than rates for other therapeutic areas in the company (Nat. Rev. Drug Discovery 2007, DOI: 10.1038/nrd2201). Looking back on the vast effort and resources spent on the program, the strategy “certainly did not live up to the promise that everyone was proposing,” Pompliano says. The GSK story exemplifies the difficulties of ...