WuXi PharmaTech's spectacular public offering last summer piqued foreign investors' interest. Top tier VC firms are now investing in contract research organizations, manufacturing plays, and start-ups shifting business operations to China.

A handful of companies control the intellectual property for and offer access to human antibody discovery and engineering capabilities. KaloBios thinks it will be one of them, having built a platform of proprietary in vitro technologies for creating and optimizing human antibodies. To fully leverage the value of its technology platform, the start-up is becoming vertically integrated, via a merger with Celscia Therapeutics, which will give it the capability to not only discover and engineer clinically relevant antibodies, but also to develop them and bring them through to the clinic quickly.

Gone are the days of random screening for new antibiotics. Now, thanks to molecular biology and genomics, start-up companies have a better sense of the mechanisms of infection. The firms think they've found novel ways to interfere with pathogens, including those resistant to current drugs.