Unmet Need
The anti-bacterial drug discovery industry must swiftly re-ignite efforts and mount a major challenge to develop novel classes of “hardy” anti-bacterial therapeutics that are effective and maintain their activity against multi-drug resistant (MDR) “ESKAPE” pathogens. ESKAPE denotes Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus Aureus, Klebsiella species, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas Aeruginosa and Enterobacter species.
The high mortality rates associated with “ESKAPE” pathogens have been highlighted by the Antimicrobial Availability Task Force (AATF) of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), which is urging biopharmaceutical companies to unveil novel therapeutic remedies to combat infectious disease. The ideal properties of such therapeutics should be the ability to be used either as stand-alone drugs or in consort with existing antibiotics.