A fortnight ago, India’s pharma industry enhanced its reputation. From just being seeing as the pill factory of the world which copies drugs discovered in the West, India produced for the first time a new chemical entity (NCE) approved by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA). The firm that pulled off this breakthrough is Wockhardt and the new antibiotic it has discovered is called Zaynich.
However, beyond the “first ever Indian” tag, there is something else about Zaynich which makes it remarkable. Sneha Richhariya from The Print explains that Zaynich is “…a new injectable antibiotic for complicated urinary tract infections (UTIs) caused by drug-resistant bacteria…
Most antibiotics used against drug-resistant bacteria work by pairing an antibiotic with a compound that blocks the enzymes bacteria produce to destroy the drug. Popular examples include ceftazidime-avibactam and meropenem-vaborbactam.
However, Zaynich takes a different route. It combines cefepime, an existing antibiotic, with zidebactam, a new molecule discovered by Wockhardt.
According to Dr Kamini Walia, senior scientist at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and head of India’s antimicrobial resistance surveillance network, the two components attack bacteria at different points in the process of building their protective cell wall.
Cefepime targets Penicillin-Binding Protein 3 (PBP3), while zidebactam binds strongly to Penicillin-Binding Protein 2 (PBP2).
Both proteins are essential for bacteria to grow and survive.
By blocking both proteins at the same time, the drug disrupts two critical steps in cell-wall construction. This makes it much harder for bacteria to survive, even when they have developed resistance to many existing antibiotics.
Scientists call this the “beta-lactam enhancer” approach. Unlike older combinations that mainly protect an antibiotic from bacterial enzymes, zidebactam actively helps kill the bacteria by targeting a second weak point. That is what makes Zaynich different from most antibiotics currently available.”
There are very very few antibiotics anywhere in the world currently which have reached Zaynich’s stage of development and that makes Wockhardt’s achievement more notable. “The global pipeline for new antibiotics has been steadily shrinking. According to a WHO analysis published in October 2025, the number of antibacterials in the global clinical pipeline has shrunk, from 97 candidates in 2023 to 90 in 2025. Of those 90, only 15 qualify as innovative.
Since the previous analysis in 2023, four agents have secured regulatory approval, one is currently under review, and ten have been discontinued during clinical development. Over the past decade, most major pharmaceutical companies have scaled back or exited antibiotic research and development.”
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