Global Financial Injection ‘Needed to Transform Development of Antibiotics’

Monday, May 18, 2015

“No new classes of antibiotics have been created for decades and our current drugs are becoming less effective as resistance increases,” O’Neill explains, of the rationale behind the report.

“We need to kick-start drug development to make sure the world has the drugs it needs, to treat infections and to enable modern medicine and surgery to continue as we know it,” he continues. “My review on AMR [antimicrobial resistance] has today published clear proposals to supercharge antibiotics discovery, potentially saving millions of lives for a fraction of the $100 trillion cost of interaction.”

In his report, O’Neill makes three recommendations on how to address the shortfall in commercial investment in antibiotics.

The first of these recommendations is to support a viable market for high-priority antibiotics by committing lump-sum payments to successful drug developers. O’Neill argues for a global body that would make payments incentivizing the development of antibiotics to combat drug resistance.

The advantage of this approach, says O’Neill, is that it eases the pressure on drug companies to sell new antibiotics in large quantities. This large-scale distribution of antibiotics can contribute to the development and spread of drug resistance.

Secondly, O’Neill says that to “jump start” a new cycle of innovation in antibiotics, a global AMR “Innovation Fund” of $2 billion over 5 years would help more “blue-sky research” into drugs and diagnostics get off the ground.

Source: Medical News Today (link opens in a new window)

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