Theravance lessons: Teamwork, patience

Sept. 14, 2009

Every drug approval has a back story.
For Theravance Inc.’s telavancin, approved Friday by the FDA as an antibiotic to combat complicated skin infections caused by the MRSA superbug, a critical part of its story came when the company discovered early on that the drug didn’t distribute in the body like it thought it would.
Luckily for the company, recalls former telavancin project leader and now Achaogen Inc. CEO Kevin Judice, one of its researchers had worked on a class of molecules that had run into a similar problem and were modified to distribute better. Those molecules and antibiotics were unrelated, Judice says, but what was the harm in trying.