Transatlantic antibiotics maker Nabriva Therapeutics just raised an enormous swath of cash – it just closed a $120 million Series B round to treat serious and highly resistant bacterial infections. It’s validation for a largely underused class of antibiotics – pleuromutilins – and a step in the direction to address global antibiotic resistance.
The first, $50 million tranche will go toward bringing its lead antibiotic, lefamulin, into phase 3 trials to treat community-acquired bacterial pneumonia.
The biotech, which is based both in Austria and Philadelphia, received the financing from new investors Vivo Capital and Orbimed Investors, who led the round. EcoR1, Boxer Capital of Tavistock Life Sciences, HB, Phase 4 Partners, Wellcome Trust, GLSV and Novartis Venture Fund. Vivo Capital and OrbiMed reps will join the startup’s supervisory board.
“We believe Nabriva is one of a few development stage companies with a truly novel antibiotic product ready for phase 3 studies and with a clear path to commercialization,” Dr. Chen Yu, a managing partner at Vivo Capital, said in a statement.
The drugs are in the pleuromutilin class of antibiotics – a subsect of drugs that have actually been around since the 1950s, though it’s only been used in animals or as a topical antimicrobial agent until recently. Nabriva has reformulated and optimized the drug so that it can be used both orally or intravenously.
Lefamulin’s been found to work effectively, in vitro, against the most common pathogens associated with community acquired bacterial pneumonia – such as S. pneumoniae, H. influenzae, M. catarrhalis, S. aureus, M. pneumoniae, L. pneumophila, and C. pneumoniae. This includes multi-drug resistant strains.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The company’s conducting preclinical work on bacteria like carbapenam-resistant enterobacteriaceae – or CRE – and looking beyond lefamulin into other pleuromutilins.
“The development of novel antibiotics with a unique mechanism of action against these pathogens is critically important in developing a new generation of drugs,” Nabriva chairman Denise Pollard-Knight said in a statement. “This Series B is a strong financial and scientific endorsement and provides Nabriva with a solid foundation to build a patient-centric global biopharmaceutical company.”
