BioCentury
ARTICLE | Product Development

Infectious metrics

December 24, 2001 8:00 AM UTC

There was a period during the mid-1990s when biotech companies focused on infectious diseases were hot. According to the mantra, it was going to be a slam dunk to develop new antibiotics because preclinical work was highly predictive of human efficacy, clinical trials would be straightforward, and companies could piggyback onto known classes of antibiotics.

The argument was that if a compound killed a bacterial infection in animals, it would kill it in humans. Thus the productivity metrics for companies developing antibiotics were supposed to be better than for companies working in other diseases...