The Swiss giant's Kosan deal is the latest in a string of ground-floor research investments.
Kosan is using genetic engineering techniques to steal the blueprints that nature uses to make antibiotics.
But the two companies are only beginning to find useful drugs, and Kosan's approach may be faster.
Kosan's drug is in midstage clinical trials, and it may have an oral version in testing by year-end.
Without Kosan's technology it would be tough to affordably produce enough quantities of the drug to conduct human trials.
Infinity is playing catch-up to two other biotech firms, Conforma Therapeutics and Kosan Biosciences, in the race to develop the first heat-shock blockers.
Maxygen is doing what larger companies often do: It's sitting back and waiting to see if tiny Kosan can really work antibiotic wizardry.
Kosan could be on to a major advance in antibiotic production.
Kosan is in early human trials of epothilone-D, a potent variant of a promising new class of chemotherapy drugs derived from an African soil bacteria, Sorangium cellulosum.
Kosan is also working with the National Cancer Institute to test analogues of geldanamycin, a bacteria-derived agent, in early human trials that may boost the effectiveness of chemotherapy.
Instead of simply imitating evolution, Kosan consciously reinvents nature's designs.
And in a year when oil prices were climbing, one has to ask what was going on at oil explorer Japan Energy Corp. (No. 49) and refiner-distributor Idemitsu Kosan (No. 51).
Kosan has generated several hundred variants of the antibiotic, some of which wipe out strains of bacteria that are resistant to most other marketed drugs--in test tube and animal experiments, anyway.
At first Kosan set out to be a pure technology outfit, engineering bacteria to randomly produce "libraries" of thousands of new polyketides that could then be sold to big drug firms.
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