The Puzzle Of Antibiotic Innovation

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015. The conference brought together leading experts to review major developments in health law over the previous year, and preview what is to come. A full agenda and links to video recordings of the panels are here. Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer of England, warns that we are approaching an antibiotic apocalypse. A former chief economist at Goldman Sachs estimates that unless dramatic action is taken now, antimicrobial resistance could kill 50 million people a year and cause $100 trillion in cumulative economic damages. In the US, dire warnings have issued from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and the President himself through an Executive Order on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria in September 2014 (summary here). The President’s new budget asks for $1.2 billion to be spent on antibiotic resistance. But last week, the science press breathlessly celebrated the discovery of a new antibiotic, teixobactin, cultured from soil samples collected in a grassy field in Maine (the study was published in Nature). Crisis over? Not so fast. Teixobactin has only been studied in mouse models, not humans. The point estimate failure rate for antibiotics from early discovery stage to actual drug approval for humans is 9...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Access All Categories Global Health Health Care Costs Innovation Pharma Policy Research Science and Health Source Type: blogs