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EXCLUSIVE LIFE SCIENCE FEATURE leaders LIFESCIENCELEADER.COM MARCH 2015 28 n retrospect, the scenario seems familiar. The future CEO joined the board in April, and by late fall the board accepted a tender offer. By the end of the year, the company's fate was sealed but still uncertain in at least one respect: would it maintain its identity as Merck's wholly owned subsidiary or ultimately meld away into big-pharma Merck (MSD, outside North America), having left its indelible mark on the history of antibiotics? "The merger certainly was not a planned event," says Cubist's chief scientific offi- cer, Dr. Steven C. Gilman. "We have always operated with the mindset that the best way to create value for shareholders and patients is to run independently, and we have never put a 'For Sale' sign on the company. Obviously, our board has a fiduciary responsibility, and we cannot choose the time when a company will become interested in us, but we have to do what's right for shareholders under our fiduciary duties. Merck has been clear this is a value-driven deal to provide new therapeutic options for patients in the future. We believe Merck will keep the Cubist mission and our drive to provide new antibiotic therapies, and we'll see how that plays out over time." In December of last year, the looming deal makes Cubist's announcement of another FDA approval — for Zerbaxa (ceftolozane/tazobactam), a treatment for "complicated," Gram-negative urinary tract and intra-abdominal infections — sound simultaneously proud and poignant. (See also "Zerbaxa — A Launch in the Limelight" on page 30.) We accept- ed an offer at that time to speak with Gilman about the approval and the significance of the product. But as context, we also discussed the acquisi- tion from the larger perspective of Cubist's origins, strategy, and accomplishments over the years. A LITTLE LIGHT HISTORY Cubist began two decades ago with the mission to address a need that had become almost completely neglected by the large pharmaceutical companies. With a drug it licensed from Lilly, the company set out to navigate the development path from start to finish independently and with the determination to fully integrate itself into a commercial entity. Despite some notable setbacks, it succeeded well — well enough, indeed, to eventually attract a Big Pharma's attention. When I asked Gilman to describe some key hurdles the company had overcome and lessons it had learned, his answer was interesting — and especially reward- ing to this journalist. Coming up with a novel query is the writer's dream. "I can't say I've ever had that question," says Gilman. "Probably the first big hurdle was the failure of our 2002 Phase 3 trial in pulmonary infections for the com- pound that would become our chief product, daptomycin [Cubicin]. We actually spent a lot of time and drove a lot of science around why that was, and that was very helpful for us and to others. Now researchers use the information we generated to make sure drugs they are developing will have a good chance of working in pulmonary infections. It is a good example of how we worked very diligently to ensure our science translated into benefits at the patient level." We need to question old pricing models because they are based on the incorrect assumption that antibiotics should be cheap and easily available. D R . S T E V E N C . G I L M A N Chief Scientif c Off cer, Cubist The news gets better and better — right until the end. Such is the in-a-nutshell version of the story of Cubist Pharmaceuticals. In the spring of 2014, a year in which the famously independent company would score new drug approvals and acquisitions of its own, early signs of its demise began to appear. I CUBIST: THE CURTAIN CLOSES By W. Koberstein