[busyant]

I used to work at an antibiotic discovery startup.

I used to joke that there were so many groups with a Gram+ antibiotic drug discovery program going that my parents were probably running one out of their cellar.

Gram- are tough.

[Fordrus]

An antibiotic discovery startup, eh?

That's freaking fascinating, I'm in bioinformatics myself, I'd love to hear more about this- I wasn't aware that an antibiotic discovery startup was/is/could be a thing at all- If you can tell me anything more or put me on the right track to reading more about your old employer in that space or whatnot, I'd appreciate it! :)

[busyant]

I'd rather not mention my recent employer.

But these startups do exist: look up Achaogen (achaogen.com) and Tetraphase (tphase.com).

Cubist Pharmaceuticals was a big antibiotic developer that was recently purchased by Merck. Cubist itself bought another startup called Trius Pharmaceuticals, which had developed a newly marketed antibiotic.

So, there is $$ to be made in antibiotic drug development, but as many people on this thread have pointed out, there is more $$$$ to be made in other therapeutic areas (e.g., oncology).

[mrfusion]

Say are there any compounds that fight only gram negative and leave positive untouched? I'm thinking that might be useful for periodontitus?

[busyant]

Many antibiotics classes seem to be partially selective at killing either Gram+ species or Gram- species.

For example, fluoroquinolones can kill both Gram+ and Gram- microbes, but they are generally better at killing Gram-.

Other classes have the reverse characteristics.

I don't know much about the types of microbes that cause periodontal disease.

However, my company was initially interested in treating Community Acquired Pneumonia (CAP). The problem with CAP (and many other bacterial infections) is that they can be caused by either Gram+ or Gram- pathogens. This means that if you're making a drug to treat CAP, you need an antibiotic that can "hit" both types.

A common occurrence when we were looking for a candidate drug that could treat CAP was that the candidate would be powerful at killing Gram+ CAP microbes and weak at killing Gram- CAP species. If we improved the drug's ability to "hit" Gram- species, we would always seem to lose potency against Gram+. It was extremely tricky to find something that was powerful enough against _all_ the relevant microbial pathogens.