Big Pharma in-licensing has been kind to anti-infectives start-ups Cubist and Versicor, giving them near-term products and significant valuations. Now Althexis, hoping to capitalize on similar opportunities, is merging with Microcide. The deal is a way of jumpstarting the still nascent Althexis and re-starting Microcide, re-setting its valuation and development clock. With Microcide's cephalosporin, technology-based Althexis would get the product focus it lacked. And the deal comes with $60mm in new money from investors who've bought CEO Mark Skaletsky's vision and want him to repeat his success at GelTex.

Pharmaceutical companies face two giant risks; compound risk and target risk. So, despite an abundance of so-called validated targets emerging from genomics efforts, and novel high throughput tools for compound synthesis and screening that yield plenty of hits against each target, at the end of the day, pharmaceutical company productivity, as measured by approved drugs, remains low. Recently, several former big-pharma executives have founded private companies that hope to speed up the time it takes to come up with optimized small molecule leads. Each has staked out a particular niche where it thinks it can do better than big pharma at coming up with clinic-ready compounds. Kinetix Pharmaceuticals and Triad Pharmaceuticals hope to leverage their knowledge of particular gene families to come up with optimized leads; Enanta Pharmaceuticals hopes to morph peptides into drugs with a combinatorial approach to binding pharmacophores, and Sunesis hopes to tackle some of the targets that prove intractable for others, or in which only large molecules have been able to intervene. The new small molecule companies share a vision of drug discovery that is based on targets, rather than diseases.