Glaxo presses on to find the next critical antibiotic

London

IN A cramped lab in rural Penn-sylvania, surrounded by technicians in obligatory white lab coats and fume hoods leaking an occasional acrid smell, Neil Pearson holds up a plastic model of a chemical compound that resembles a spidery piece of Lego.

Mr Pearson, a 54-year-old chemist and senior fellow at British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithkline plc, explains how he spent more than a decade tinkering with chemical compounds before engineering a molecule that may yield the industry's first truly new antibiotic in 30 years to fight the rise of superbugs that risk killing an extra 10 million people every year by 2050.

Adverse reactions, including possible eye and heart problems discovered in animals, forced Mr Pearson to start over multiple times, with each re-jigging of the compound's atomic structure requiring a fresh round of tests to prove it was safe and effective. Mr Pears…