An Antibiotic to the Rescue

The bad news rippled through the well manicured office park in Lexington, Mass., and settled somewhere on Jeff Alder's desk in January 2002. Cubist, a drug development company focusing on creating novel anti-infectives, was cutting short the first Phase III trial of its lead anti-infective compound, an intravenous antibiotic then called Cidecin. The problem was that the drug was not effective in treating community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). The failure took everyone by surprise, and stock prices at the company, which had gone public in 1996, plummeted more than 40%. Cubist, which had lost $70 million in 2001 and was banking on FDA approval of its lead drug candidate, considered the news devastating. "Basically," Alder says, "everything was riding on why we had this failure in the CAP trials."