Targanta Therapeutics Corporation was a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

. The company also had operations in Indianapolis

Indianapolis

Indianapolis is the capital of the U.S. state of Indiana, and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population is 839,489. It is by far Indiana's largest city and, as of the 2010 U.S...

, Montreal

Montreal

Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

 and Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

. Targanta completed its initial public offering

Initial public offering

An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...

 on October 9, 2007 and trades on the Nasdaq

NASDAQ

The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...

 market under the symbol: TARG. Targanta was acquired by The Medicines Company in 2009.

Development Programs

Targanta’s lead product candidate was oritavancin

Oritavancin

Oritavancin is a novel semi-synthetic glycopeptide antibiotic being developed for the treatment of serious Gram-positive infections...

, a novel, semi-synthetic glycopeptide antibiotic

Glycopeptide antibiotic

Glycopeptide antibiotics are a class of antibiotic drugs. The class is composed of glycosylated cyclic or polycyclic nonribosomal peptides. Significant glycopeptide antibiotics include vancomycin, teicoplanin, telavancin, bleomycin, ramoplanin, and decaplanin....

 being developed to treat serious Gram-positive

Gram-positive

Gram-positive bacteria are those that are stained dark blue or violet by Gram staining. This is in contrast to Gram-negative bacteria, which cannot retain the crystal violet stain, instead taking up the counterstain and appearing red or pink...

 infections in the hospital and other institutional settings. Oritavancin was originally discovered and developed by Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly and Company

Eli Lilly and Company is a global pharmaceutical company. Eli Lilly's global headquarters is located in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the United States...

; Targanta acquired worldwide rights to oritavancin from InterMune in late 2005. Data presented at the 47th Annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in September 2007 demonstrated that oritavancin possesses potent and rapid bactericidal activity in vitro against a broad spectrum of both resistant and susceptible Gram-positive bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus

Staphylococcus aureus

Staphylococcus aureus is a facultative anaerobic Gram-positive coccal bacterium. It is frequently found as part of the normal skin flora on the skin and nasal passages. It is estimated that 20% of the human population are long-term carriers of S. aureus. S. aureus is the most common species of...

, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a bacterium responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans. It is also called multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and oxacillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus...

, Enterococci, Clostridium difficile

Clostridium difficile

Clostridium difficile , also known as "CDF/cdf", or "C...

 and Streptococci. Results have been presented but not yet published from two pivotal Phase 3 clinical trials testing the efficacy of oritavancin for the treatment of Complicated skin and skin-structure infections

Complicated skin and skin-structure infections

Complicated skin and skin structure infections also known as cSSSIs are the name for common infections treated in the hospital setting. The main treatment of these infections is antimicrobial therapy along with possible surgery...

 (cSSSI) caused by Gram-positive bacteria. The primary endpoints of both studies were successfully met, with oritavancin achieving efficacy with fewer days of therapy than the comparator agents (vancomycin followed by cephalexin). In addition, oritavancin showed a significantly improved safety profile with a 19.2 percent relative reduction in the overall incidence of adverse events versus vancomycin/cephalexin (p<0.001) in the second and larger pivotal trial.

Targanta also developed a novel drug discovery platform to generate molecules that deliver antibiotics directly to the bone. Also at the 47th ICAAC meeting in September 2007, Targanta presented the first in vivo pre-clinical data on candidates from this program, demonstrating efficacy of its rifabutin-bisphosphonate prodrug (TT99000647) in a rabbit osteomyelitis

Osteomyelitis

Osteomyelitis simply means an infection of the bone or bone marrow...

model.