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Using spores of harmless bacteria to fight a deadly germ proves difficile, Cambridge company learns
By adamg on Fri, 07/29/2016 - 9:59am
Xconomy reports the stock price for Cambridge-based Seres Therapeutics is dropping like a rock on news that its novel attempt to treat an increasingly antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria didn't seem to work much better than a placebo.
Rather than developing a drug to directly kill Clostridium difficile, the company is working on a "microbiome" approach in which patients are administered spores of other, harmless bacteria that should colonize the patient's digestive tract and keep C. difficile from taking hold. It's a roughly similar idea to fecal transplants, which are now often used with patients whose normal digestive bacteria have been killed by antibiotics given for other conditions.
But the company reported this morning, testing with 89 patients failed to show much of an improvement over a placebo.
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Comments
An example
This is an example of why drug discovery is so expensive. Many leads that look promising don't pan out - often at a stage where millions of dollars have already been invested in them. So the cost for each successful drug includes all the related prior attempts that failed.
Drug Discovery?
What they are trying to do that is expensive is find an expensive pharmaceutical alternative to poop transplants. That shit was so effective that they stopped trials and offered it to all the participants.