Is Your State on the List?

Facilities Enrolled in NHSN, by State (total=2456)

CDC currently supports more than 2000 hospitals that are using NHSN and 21 states require hospitals to report HAI’s using NHSN.

The NHSN is a secure, internet-based surveillance system that integrates former CDC surveillance systems, including the National Nosocomial Infections Surveillance System (NNIS), National Surveillance System for Healthcare Workers (NaSH), and the Dialysis Surveillance Network (DSN).

NHSN enables healthcare facilities to collect and use data about healthcare-associated infections, adherence to clinical practices known to prevent healthcare-associated infections, the incidence or prevalence of multidrug-resistant organisms within their organizations, and other adverse events. Some U.S. states utilize NHSN as a means for healthcare facilities to submit data on healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) mandated through their specific state legislation.

Consumer’s Union Not Impressed

Despite efforts to create a national, publicly available, hospital-by-hospital infection reporting system in the recently approved health care reform law, just a stripped-down version of it was enacted, using only a confidential reporting method. The law will impose financial penalties — a 1 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursements — on hospitals with the worst performance on a list of hospital-acquired conditions that include several types of infections.

Read Consumer Reports Results and view video.

“We need a national system that is standardized,” said Lisa McGiffert, campaign director for the Safe Patient Project of Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports. “We really need a system that shows every hospital’s performance individually and not grouped together as a hospital system, like some reports allow. Individual hospitals in the same system can be very different.”

List of Patient Safety Pending Legislation

Safe Patient Project

http://www.safepatientproject.org/

About Mandatory Reporting

Will facilities in states with mandatory reporting have to submit data twice: once to the state and once to CDC?

No, the state, or entity authorized by the state to collect reports of healthcare associated infections, will view and analyze reports using a special function of the application referred to as “group functionality.” A group is created by a participating facility. Other facilities in the same state could join the group; all facilities would confer rights to the State or entity authorized to view and analyze reports. Facilities within the group cannot see each other’s data; only at the group level can data from the participating facilities be viewed and analyzed, as authorized by each facility. Facilities might collect more data than is required to be reported, and they can limit the authority of the group to view only data that are reportable. For example, a facility might conduct surveillance for surgical site infections associated with several different surgical procedures, but only authorize the group to view data on CABG.

California Hospital Acquired Infection Complaints

Consumers Union charges the State of California is not upholding patient safety laws.

Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, is an independent, nonprofit testing and informational organization.  An estimated 240,000 California patients develop infections resulting from their hospitalizations each year, resulting in an estimated 13,500 deaths at a cost of $3.1 billion, Consumers Union says.

Separately, medical errors reportedly kill as many as 10,000 Californians each year and injure 140,000.  These errors include a class of adverse events known as “never-events” because they can be prevented, Consumers Union says in a nine-page report published last month.

Kathleen Billingsley, deputy director of the state Center for Health Care Quality, said the agency was improving the level of care for all Californians after disbanding the legally required Healthcare-Associated Infection Advisory Committee and failing to clearly move forward with a series of other initiatives to reduce hospital- acquired infections.

The Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety is a group in the Department of Human Services which recently noted, “These are not people dying because they are ill or injured. These are people dying from an adverse effect of their care … The number is unacceptable.”

Pennsylvania Hospital Acquire Infection Reporting Issues

The Pennsylvania Department of Health will release its first full-year’s worth of hospital-by-hospital data in May of 2010 showing how many bloodstream, urinary tract and other infections patients contracted during hospital stays in 2009.

But even though the state has been collecting similar data since 2005, and anecdotal evidence indicates that at least some hospitals have made significant progress — particularly in the Pittsburgh area — it won’t be possible to say how the state has done over the past half-decade in its nationally celebrated effort to reduce hospital-acquired infections.

That’s because the way infection reporting has been collected and analyzed has changed so much year to year — and agency to agency — that drawing long-term conclusions using the state’s data is impossible, state officials and experts say.

Nationally, the report found rates for three of five major types of serious hospital-related infections had increased in 2007 — the last full year national data was available for analysis — including an 8 percent increase in one of the most fatal infections, bloodstream infections following surgery.

Ms. McGiffert and others said a system like Pennsylvania’s hospital-by-hospital public reporting is still the model, despite the problems that now hobble making long-term conclusions.

From 2005 to 2007, the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council issued infection reports before the Health Department took over in 2008 with a vastly different system of reporting.

“It’s just not possible to compare all the information that PHC4 was collecting to what the Department of Health is now getting,” said Mike Doering, executive director of the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, a state agency that uses infection reporting to educate hospitals on best practices and problem areas.

“It’s now a different set of infections that are reported, a different set of patients, even a different set of hospitals. Plus the data is collected in a different way,” he said.

PHC4 collected data directly from all of the state’s 165 acute- care hospitals, first in four infection categories — urinary tract, pneumonia, bloodstream and surgical site — and then two more, gastrointestinal and an “other” category.

The agency also reported on other categories that hospitals took particular issue with: how many people died after contracting infections; the average length of stay for someone with an infection; and how much patients were charged.

“That’s one of the things we liked about PHC4; they collected data that people wanted to see,” said Ms. McGiffert.

The state was lauded nationally for its public reporting, even as the state’s hospitals and their lobbyists roundly criticized PHC4 reports as an unfair, unscientific reflection of their work. They pushed for a new system handled by the Health Department, which was approved in 2007.

“This is a more robust and actionable reporting system, rather than trying to create a system based on an overall hospital visitation rate” like PHC4 was using, said Paula Bussard, senior vice president of policy and regulatory services for the Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania.

“It’s not starting over. It’s moving forward, and you always have to start somewhere,” she said.

Pennsylvania hospitals no longer report directly to the state. Instead, hospitals report to the National Health and Safety Network, a surveillance system managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state pulls its data from that system.

The Health Department reports on nine infection categories, including four that PHC4 did not: eye, ear, nose and throat; lower respiratory tract; reproductive; and skin and soft tissue.

More institutions are included in the Health Department’s reports — 246 in all, 81 more than PHC4 studied — adding mental health hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, specialty general acute-care hospitals and long-term acute-care hospitals. It also is reporting on more categories of patients, adding those with burn injuries, organ transplants, mental disorders, drug and alcohol disorders, and children younger than 2.

The change in reporting caused so many problems that the first half-year of data collected by the Health Department in 2008 was so replete with mistakes that the department decided not to use it and released information only from the second half of the year.

Although PHC4 has not issued a report on hospital-acquired infections since it released the 2007 data, it still has the authority to do so and may release future reports on infection- related deaths, length of stays and costs that the Health Department is not reporting. PHC4’s board meets in July and will consider then whether to issue any future infection reports.

The Health Department report might not be much help in saying how the state has done in the past, but it is vitally important to hospitals’ futures. That’s because the report on 2009 data will become the base year that the state will use to set infection- reduction goals.

The law that gave the department reporting responsibilities set the first-year goal as a 10 percent reduction in infections for every hospital. The department will set the reduction goals for future years. If those goals are not met, hospitals could face financial penalties.

The Pittsburgh region long has been considered a leader in the infection battle after 33 hospitals here were involved in a successful joint project from 2001 to 2005 that significantly reduced central line bloodstream infections. Most local hospitals have already brought their rates down significantly, and they continue groundbreaking work on infections:

* Allegheny General Hospital has dropped its ventilator- associated infection rate in its trauma intensive care unit by 30 percent over the past two years by closely monitoring how many hours a day patients on ventilators were sitting up, rather than lying down;

* UPMC Montefiore recently began using a SwabCap, a device with a small, alcohol-doused sponge inside an orange cap that is placed on the unused hub of a central line that has been inserted inside a patient to keep the hub clean and prevent a bloodstream infection;

* Excela Health, which runs Latrobe, Frick and Westmoreland hospitals, has instituted a “storytelling” session for staff to try to figure out the source of an infection and reinforce daily hygiene practices.

“The thinking back in 2001 was, ‘Well, if you have a more high- risk population of patients, you’re allowed to have a higher rate,’ ” said Dr. Carlene Muto, UPMC’s medical director for infection control. “We said the hell with that, our goal is zero.”

Dr. Muto showed internal data that demonstrated UPMC’s ongoing effort to drive the most lethal of infections — central line bloodstream infections — down to nearly zero, which is why it is trying novel approaches such as the SwabCap.

Dr. Stephen Ostroff, director of the bureau of epidemiology for the Health Department, said the work that began in the past decade appears to have had ongoing benefits.

“That is clearly seen in our report. Clearly, facilities in the western part of the state look better than the rest of the state,” he said. “One of their challenges is that since they’re so far out in front of others, they’re going to have a hard time bringing it down even more, because ultimately we do want to bring everyone down to zero.”

Lee Ann Torrans
ltorrans@gmail.com

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., June 8 — Winston-Salem State University issued the following news release:

A Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) researcher is working to fine tune ultrasound waves to destroy dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria that causes open wound infections that claims lives annually.

Bacteria in open wounds are often treated with antibiotics, according to Dr. Teresa Conner-Kerr, WSSU Department of Physical Therapy chair in the School of Health Sciences and author of the study. But antibiotic-resistant forms of bacteria, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), are emerging as problems in daycares, sports facilities and homes. They are no longer just a problem in hospitals.

Conner-Kerr and her research team found that very low frequency ultrasound at 35 khz kills bacteria including — MRSA — by puncturing and fracturing the bacterial cell walls and altering the cells’ tendencies to grow in colonies. This study measured the effects of ultrasound on bacterial viability, cell wall structure, colony characteristics and antibiotic sensitivity. The study was conducted on in vitro bacteria samples. The study documented that when exposed to 30 seconds of treatment, antibiotic-resistant forms of bacteria dropped from 106 per milliliter to six per milliliter, an approximate 99 percent drop.

“We are happy to report, based on our study, 35 kHz very low frequency ultrasound is more effective at reducing total bacteria cells in vitro than other frequencies of ultrasound. This is encouraging and timely news because standard therapies are failing and the importance of finding alternative approaches to managing these pathogens are becoming increasingly important,” said Conner-Kerr, “but further study is recommended on this potentially effective therapy.”

In the past, one antibiotic medication, methicillin, has been effective in killing open wound bacteria. But increasing cases of MRSA have become a particular concern in the medical community. This study focused on those bacterial strains.

Conner-Kerr and her research team found very low frequency ultrasound alone and in combination with standard antimicrobial compounds may prove to be beneficial and may provide an alternative strategy for not only treating antibiotic-resistant bacteria including MRSA but also in reversing its resistance to drugs. The ability to resensitize MRSA to methicillin points to a new way of utilizing older antibiotics that have become ineffective by pairing them with low frequency ultrasound when administered to the wound bed. Because low frequency ultrasound penetrates tissue deeply, the entire wound can be treated.

Lee Ann Torrans
ltorrans@gmail.com

“We found that 72 (6%) of 1,674 PICU patients were colonized with MRSA.

MRSA-colonized patients were more likely to be younger (median age 3 years vs. 5 years; p = 0.02) and African American (p <0.001) and to have been hospitalized within 12 months (p <0.001) than were noncolonized patients.

MRSA isolates from 66 (92%) colonized patients were fingerprinted; 40 (61%) were genotypically Community Acquired -MRSA strains.

Community Acquired – MRSA strains were isolated from 50% of patients who became colonized with MRSA and caused the only hospital-acquired MRSA catheter-associated bloodstream infection in the cohort.

Epidemic Community Acquired – MRSA strains are becoming endemic to Pediatric ICUs, can be transmitted to hospitalized children, and can cause invasive hospital-acquired infections,” wrote A.M. Milstone and colleagues, Johns Hopkins University, Medical Department.

The researchers concluded: “Further appraisal of MRSA control is needed.”

Milstone and colleagues published their study in Emerging Infectious Diseases (Community-associated Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Strains in Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2010;16(4):647-655).

According to recent research from the United States, “Virulent community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus-aureus (CA-MRSA) strains have spread rapidly in the United States. To characterize the degree to which CA-MRSA strains are imported into and transmitted in pediatric intensive care units (PICU), we performed a retrospective study of children admitted to The Johns Hopkins Hospital PICU, March 1, 2007 May 31, 2008.”

For additional information, contact A.M. Milstone, Johns Hopkins University, School Medical, Dept. of Pediatrics Infectious Disease, 200 N Wolfe St., Rubenstein 3141, Baltimore, MD 21287, US

Medizone International, Inc. (Dually Traded: OTCBB/OTCQB: MZEI)
(http://medizoneint.com)

Medizone International, Inc. is a research and development company engaged in developing its AsepticSure™ System to decontaminate and sterilize hospitals, sports training facilities, schools and other critical infrastructure. A government variant is being developed for bio-terrorism counter measures. Successful decontamination by AsepticSure™ to the 6 log standard or greater has been demonstrated with C.difficile, E coli, Pseudomonas aeruginous, MRSA, VRE and Bacillius subtilis.

Lee Ann Torrans

ltorrans@gmail.com

Alice M. Brennan was 88, but she didn’t look or act very old.

She lived independently in Lockport, managed her own finances, drove a car and maintained an active social schedule.

Her daughter, Mary Brennan-Taylor, likes to show a photograph of her mother dancing at a family wedding last year.

“She had the spirit of an 18-year-old,” said Brennan-Taylor.

But Alice Brennan’s right leg began to experience pain and swelling in 2009. She was hospitalized briefly, diagnosed with gout and sent to a nursing home for rehabilitation.

Instead of recuperating from the severe form of arthritis, she deteriorated and died six weeks after the initial hospitalization.

Her family contends three infections that Brennan developed led to her death.

“What’s most difficult for me is that this was preventable,” said Brennan-Taylor.

Brennan’s story illustrates a major challenge in health care.

It was once believed that antibiotics would erase bacterial infections. Instead, overuse and misuse of the drugs in medicine and on farms is making treatment of infections more difficult as germs evolve with growing resistance.

An estimated 99,000 deaths associated with infections occur in hospitals alone each year, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In recent decades, infections became so common that they were considered an unavoidable complication of caring for the sickest patients. Yet many are avoidable.

“We assume that infections are natural, that they emerge out of nowhere because they often occur in people who are already ill. But infections are transmitted. That means they can be prevented and these deaths reduced,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, the lead investigator for Extending the Cure, a project examining antibiotic resistance based at Resources for the Future, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Hospitals are trying to improve.

Earlier this year, for instance, a project at more than 100 Michigan intensive-care units reported a 66 percent drop in bloodstream infections from the placement of catheters in veins after adopting a checklist of infection-control practices, including hand-washing, and measuring the results.

But potentially fatal infections like the ones linked to Brennan’s death persist despite the existence of measures to limit the spread of microbes.

In its 2009 quality report to Congress released last month, the Health and Human Services Department found “very little progress” on eliminating health care-acquired infections.

Among five major infections examined, the rate of bloodstream illness following surgery increased 8 percent from 2006 to 2007, while the rate of post-operative urinary tract infections from catheters rose 3.6 percent.

There is debate over the quality report’s conclusion about progress that forthcoming government studies may clarify. But there is little disagreement over the problem of antibiotic resistance and the specter of making once-treatable diseases untreatable, as if the era before antibiotics had returned.

“If we use antibiotics more appropriately we will improve our ability to treat bacterial infections, and if we do a better job of infection control, we will reduce the need for antibiotics,” said Laxminarayan.

In a recent study, he and his colleagues found that two common hospital-acquired infections — pneumonia and sepsis, a bloodstream illness — killed 48,000 people and increased health costs by $8.1 billion in 2006 alone. The research looked at deaths actually caused by infections, whereas the CDC statistic of 99,000 refers to deaths associated with hospital-acquired infections.

Laxminarayan said solutions to the problem will require stronger government leadership to develop new antibiotics, better treatment strategies and community infection-control efforts that go beyond hospitals.

Brennan’s case illustrates how patients and microbes today travel from facility to facility.

She was discharged July 17 from Eastern Niagara Hospital (formerly Lockport Memorial) to the Odd Fellows & Rebekah Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Lockport for what was supposed to be two weeks of therapy to help with walking.

However, she began to suffer from hallucinations, incontinence and loss of appetite, symptoms her daughter contends resulted from a high dose of a muscle relaxant.

Brennan was readmitted Aug. 3 to Eastern Niagara with dehydration and a few days later sent back to Odd Fellows, where symptoms worsened and grew to include abdominal pain, according to Brennan- Taylor.

She returned to the hospital around Aug. 10 with a urinary tract infection caused by MRSA, a bacterium resistant to common antibiotics, said Brennan-Taylor. Her mother was treated with another antibiotic, vancomycin, but continued to decline. Then tests identified two more bacterial infections — clostridium difficile, which causes diarrhea, and vancomycin-resistant enterococci, which can cause skin wounds.

“My mom fell prey to a fragmented health system and a complacent attitude about infections,” said Brennan-Taylor. “People in health care act as if infections are inevitable, or that this happens all the time, and they can turn it around. It shouldn’t be something they deal with all the time.”

A state Health Department investigation faulted the hospital for not implementing an adequate care plan for isolating the patient. A review of Odd Fellows found no evidence to corroborate Brennan- Taylor’s complaint of inadequate care.

Hospital and nursing home officials declined to discuss the case, citing privacy laws.

In a prepared statement, hospital spokeswoman Carolyn Moore said the hospital maintains an infection-control program that includes surveillance of inpatients. She said Eastern Niagara takes the additional step of screening patients at admission for MRSA, which individuals can carry into a facility. Eugene L. Urban, chief executive officer of Odd Fellows, in a statement, said the nursing home has not been found to be in violation of any infection-control standards.

Much of the focus on infections has centered around staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium commonly carried on the skin or in the nose of healthy people. About 30 percent of healthy individuals in the community have staph living in their nose but aren’t infected.

Staph can cause an infection, usually minor skin ailments, and outbreaks have become more common in locker rooms and schools. But another strain of staph bacteria occurs most frequently in hospitals and nursing homes, where it can cause serious infections in the blood, lungs and surgery sites.

MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, is the type of staph that is resistant to common antibiotics. Of the individuals living with staph in their noses, an estimated 1 percent have the MRSA strain.

The community-acquired strain of MRSA is a growing problem, including in Buffalo.

A study reported this year of Kaleida Health hospitals reflected what is happening across the country. The rate of suspected community-acquired MRSA in patients increased for adults from 56 percent in 2003 to 71 percent in 2006, and for children from 26 percent to 64 percent.

Most MRSA occurs in health care facilities, where the bacteria can enter the body through wounds, catheters and ventilators. Older and weakened patients are especially vulnerable.

“It’s complicated for hospitals because you often can’t differentiate hospital-acquired MRSA from the community variety,” said Dr. Chiu Bin Hsiao, lead author and associate professor of infectious diseases at the University at Buffalo.

MRSA is just one of many antibiotic-resistant pathogens that pose a danger to patients and that can be spread by skin-to-skin contact or by touching contaminated items. Others include acinetobacter, pseudomonas aeruginosa and clostridium difficile.

Cases of clostridium difficile are now more common than MRSA in community hospitals, according to research reported in March at an international conference on health care infections. These bacteria normally live in the large intestine, but taking antibiotics for other infections can wipe out the “good” bacteria in the digestive tract that keep them from proliferating like weeds on a lawn.

Efforts under way to curb infections include financial penalties by Medicare and private insurers for preventable episodes in hospitals, screening of patients for MRSA and hospital-acquired infection reporting by more than half the states.

New York last year began releasing 12 different infection rates for hospitals. No one facility was found to have a high infection rate across the board, but officials say it’s premature to draw conclusions.

“The public perception has been that a patient comes into a hospital and gets an infection. But the problem is much more complex, with different types of infections in different health care settings,” said Rachel Stricof, director of the state’s bureau of health care-associated infections.

One solution is to deny payment to hospitals for some infections, although critics contend it’s impossible to eliminate all infections. They say the penalties don’t account for patients who are extraordinarily ill, or for the way patients routinely move through multiple facilities for care.

Veterans Affairs hospitals began screening patients for MRSA in 2007. The mandated measure resulted in a decline nationally in transmission of MRSA and new infections, although a recent study at the VA Medical Center in Buffalo did not find a similar drop in new infections over the first two years of the program for reasons that remain unclear.

Screening may work against MRSA, but its high cost would impose a huge financial burden on private hospitals with far more patients, said Dr. John Sellick, lead author of the study and the medical center’s epidemiologist.

“There are a lot of other infections to control, and hospitals don’t get reimbursed more for these measures. You have to consider what is the best use of your human and laboratory resources,” he said.

Sellick said hospitals should encourage a culture in which the entire staff buys into a system of infection control.

To Brennan-Taylor, who took her mother’s death hard, what’s needed at a minimum is a change in thinking about the scale of the problem.

“The deaths are isolated, so they don’t get much attention,” she said. “But it’s akin to a jumbo jet crashing every other day.”

e-mail: hdavis@buffnews.com

Caption: Harry Scull Jr./Buffalo News Alice M. Brennan, 88, died six weeks after her initial hospitalization, where she was diagnosed with gout and sent to a nursing home for rehabilitation. Patient safety WNY hospitals with infection rates significantly better or worse than state average [Graphic - see microfilm]

Document BFNW000020100511e65a0001s

Lee Ann Torrans
ltorrans@gmail.com

As science reconstructs deaths of great men in hind sight and we have come to understand Edgar Allen Poe suffered a prolonged and painful death from rabies as opposed to alcohol as believed at the time.  I wonder if Dylan Thomas might have died of a hospital acquired infection rather than alcohol poisoning.  No doubt alcohol was the basis for admission and was a contributing cause of his death but was it the sole cause?

Link Here to Hear Dylan Thomas Reading His Poetry (Caution: is a bit loud now — will edit to lower the sound soon.)

I believe this poem touches on the emotion of mourning.  In this country 99,000 needless deaths occur followed by mourning and grief.

Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Lee Ann Torrans ltorrans@gmail.com

Congressional Hearing: Subcommittee on Health Antibiotic Resistance and the Threat to Public Health
Hearings – Subcommittee on Health – Wednesday, 28 April 2010 13:02

See Text of hearing:

The hearing explored the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance and the effects it has on human health.  The Subcommittee on Health held a hearing entitled “Antibiotic Resistance and the Threat to Public Health” on Wednesday, April 28, 2010. The hearing explored the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance and the effects it has on human health.

Enanta Pharmaceuticals Begins Phase I Trial of EDP-322, the First MRSA-Active Bicyclolide in April 2010.

In our in vitro studies, EDP-322 demonstrated good potency against both hospital- and community-acquired MRSA, even against highly drug-resistant MRSA strains,” explained Yat Sun Or, Ph.D., Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Enanta. “The potency of EDP-322 against hospital-acquired MRSA, community-acquired MRSA, and other gram-positive pathogens, combined with the convenience of oral administration, has the potential to uniquely position EDP-322 among marketed MRSA drugs in both the hospital and community settings.”

__________________________________

Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. enrolled the first subject in its Phase 2 trial of an antibacterial drug candidate for patients with a form of severe and sometimes life-threatening diarrhea. The drug candidate (CB-183,315) targets diarrhea caused by Clostridium difficile, known as C. difficile-associated diarrhea. The trial is expected to enroll 200-plus subjects.

Cubist spent approximately $402.5 million to buy a California company that is developing an antibiotic to fight superbugs.

Cubist, a Lexington therapeutics company, already markets an antibiotic, Cubicin, to battle infections caused by the methicillin- resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria. Now it has agreed to pay $92.5 million cash – and as much as $310 million more in future milestone payments – to acquire two-year-old Calixa Therapeutics of San Diego, which is testing an antibiotic called CXA- 201 to treat complicated urinary tract and intra-abdominal infections.

Cubist employs about 600 people worldwide, including 370 in Massachusetts.

Cubist plans to take over management of Calixa’s clinical trials and extend them to treat nosocomial pneumonia, also known as hospital-acquired pneumonia. It plans to file a new drug application for CXA-201 with the Food and Drug Administration by the second half of 2013.

Cubist is also pressing a patent suit against Teva Parenteral Medicines Inc. of Israel, which is developing a generic version of Cubist’s primary drug, Cubicin. A trial has been set for April 25, 2011, four months before the FDA could rule on Teva’s application to sell its generic drug in the United States.

Cubist currently markets the antibiotic Cubicin, for infections by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria. The high-profile drug, Cubicin, use to fight MRSA infections is an important asset for Cubist.

April 2010

Lee Ann Torrans

ltorrans@gmail.com