The Wellcome Trust will continue to help fund the early stages of drug discovery for another five years by extending its Seeding Drug Discovery initiative with a further £110 million.

Biota Holdings has acquired early stage antibacterial programmes from the UK firm Prolysis and MaxThera of the US, in an effort to extend its research interests beyond antivirals and into the wider anti-infective area.

Prolysis Ltd. reckons it has a head start over other biotechs seeking novel anti-infectives because its core technology--a series of whole cell assays targeting critical bacterial pathways--allows it to select, early on, only those compounds that get inside the bacterial cell.

The rise in bacterial resistance has prompted a plethora of creative approaches to developing antibiotics. These range from finding completely novel targets to harnessing the body's own immune system to fight bacteria. And although biotechs have had the anti-bacterials space to themselves for the last few years, as more programs reach proof of concept, some Big Pharma may be showing signs of renewed interest.