Why Superbugs Are Beating Big Pharma

In a cramped lab in rural Pennsylvania, 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. 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.

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