In the Sunday Times Business Supplement – 20 March 2022 in an article called ‘The Great Antibiotic Fear’ written by the Sunday Times pharma, consumer and leisure correspondent Sabah Meddings, the opening words of the article say as follows ‘In the 30 years that Dr Neil Todd has worked as a clinical microbiologist, he has watched as the number of antibiotics available to treat patients has grown fewer. Neil, one of our PEPS Committee Members continues – he is down to his last resort. We’re now scraping the bottom of the barrel of drugs we’ve got that we can use. Arlene Brailey, our Patient Services Officer, also features in the article. She says we need to push for the development of new antibiotics.
Antibiotic development void
The article’s main focus is the antibiotic development void. It talks of the severe financial crunch faced by companies in the antibiotic development space. Even if a small biotech company gets initial funding to develop novel antibiotics, there is no follow on finance and tragically when the company gets marketing approval, the share price generally collapses and in extreme cases the company goes bankrupt. Professor Colin Garner has written about some of the issues in a recent blog.
This is a human tragedy. Society is desperate for new antibiotics! But, the financial system to encourage pharmaceutical drug development is broken. No return on investment for antibiotics means financial and market failure. New market entry awards are under development but progress is too slow and the proposed investment too little. As Arlene Brailey says in the article ‘She regularly hears from sufferers of chronic infections for whom existing antibiotics no longer work. They (patients) talk about the fear and dread when an antibiotic can’t be found any more’.
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