(Bloomberg News) Optimer Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s Dificid is on track to lead as many as five new antibiotics onto the market over the next three years as a surge in drug-resistant germs stokes the need for new medicines.

The biotechnology industry is starting to fill a critical public-health niche being mostly shunned by larger drugmakers. Since 2006, only three of 111 drugs cleared in the U.S. were antibiotics. Optimer, a San Diego company with no marketed products, may win U.S. approval by May 30 to sell Dificid, a drug that fights stomach infections, the company has said.

"Pharma abandoned the antibiotic space because they didn't think there was enough of a revenue opportunity," said Alan Carr, a New York-based analyst with Needham & Co. "A smaller, more manageable product with revenue under $1 billion is fine for a biotech company."

Dificid may generate $500 million a year in sales, Carr said in a telephone interview. Other companies in final testing of drugs that may gain U.S. marketing approval by 2014 are: Trius Therapeutics Inc., based in San Diego; The Medicines Co., of Parsippany, New Jersey; Boston-based Paratek Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Lexington, Massachusetts; and closely held Durata Therapeutics of Morristown, New Jersey.

The first antibiotic-resistant germs appeared in the 1940s. Since then, at least 13 strains of bacteria impervious to some antibiotics have emerged, with one called MRSA the most common, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta.

100,000 Killed Yearly

Germs resistant to one or more drugs kill 100,000 U.S. hospital patients a year and cost the health-care system more than $34 billion, according to the Infectious Disease Society of America, based in Arlington, Virginia.

"We desperately need drugs that can treat bugs that are resistant to everything, or almost everything, available," said Brad Spellberg, an associate professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a telephone interview.

Antibiotics have changed the world since 1928, when researchers learned by accident that penicillium mold had an antibacterial effect. By the 1940s, penicillin was treating soldiers wounded in World War II and saving the lives of people with pneumonia, syphilis and diphtheria. Bacterial meningitis no longer killed 90 percent of infected children.

From 1942 to the mid-1970s, drugmakers rolled out 10 new types of antibiotics, each with unique targets and modes of action, a report by the Federation of American Scientists found.

Two Drugmakers

Since then, most new antibiotics have been modifications of old ones and, today, only two of the top six drugmakers by market value are developing antibiotics, spokesmen said.

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