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Humanity Is Running Out Of Antibiotics
Category: Pharma NewsBecause on one hand, research and development for new antibiotics is ridiculously costly, and on the other hand, rapid resistance to antibiotics means the pharma company stops earning from it, the result is an increasingly desperate need for new antibiotics that can cure emerging diseases, or even effectively treat existing ones.
But both Man and Payne also acknowledged that there are scientific obstacles to antibiotic research that cannot be solved by incentives alone. A deadly new class of antibiotic-resistant bacteria — so-called gram-negative bacteria — have a protective layer that has largely stymied drug developers. Drug-resistant bacteria “have multiple defense mechanisms to new drugs,” says Man. “There are difficult technical challenges.”
To Cars, the scientific challenges are more worrying than the financial obstacles. “Even if we got the incentives right, there’s a knowledge gap that needs to be filled,” he says. “The pharmaceutical companies have already picked the low-hanging fruit and developed drugs for the ‘easy’ bacteria. We are facing a rapidly spreading pandemic. And we are running out of ammunition. We need to do something now.”