Why companies are sharing their data from scrapped antibiotic studies

An effort to pool data from antibiotic research projects just got a big boost. Last year, the Pew Charitable Trusts launched a free resource dubbed SPARK — Shared Platform for Antibiotic Research and Knowledge — that collects published and unpublished data in a bid to advance research on new antibiotics. Novartis just announced it will give SPARK access to data from three antibacterial research programs that were scrapped last year. Achaogen has also said it'll share data from its own discontinued antibiotic program with SPARK. “Our hope is that the data from these early research programs will reinvigorate the pipeline of antibiotics in development,” Pew’s Allan Coukell said in a statement.