Global innovation fund could boost development of new antibiotics, says report
Pharma industry needs to look beyond profit and loss and act with enlightened self interest in tackling antimicrobial resistance
The pharmaceutical industry is being asked to support a US$2bn global innovation fund to boost 'blue-sky' research into new antibiotics and 'get more good ideas off the ground'.
A new report, entitled Securing new drugs for future generations: The Pipeline of Antibiotics, from the UK-government appointed Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), sets out key proposals of ensuring that research and development of antibiotics is commercially sustainable, creating a more stable commercial end market for antibiotics and to reduce barriers to drug development by lowering costs, improving the efficiency of research and lowering global regulatory hurdles.
The report suggests that pharmaceutical companies should be given incentives of up to $3bn to find and develop new desperately needed antibiotics.
Author Jim O'Neill, an economist and Chairman of the AMR, says Big Pharma needs to look beyond short-term assessments of profit and loss and 'act with enlightened self-interest' in tackling antimicrobial resistance, recognising that it has a long-term commercial imperative to having effective antibiotics, as well as a moral one'.
The report says the AMR's analysis of recently approved antibiotics and those at various stages of development 'shows a mismatch between what we know the world needs, given emerging levels of drug resistance, and the size and quality of the pipeline to address this growing challenge'.
The industry has a long-term commercial imperative to having effective antibiotics, as well as a moral one
The main reason for this is that the commercial return for new antibiotics is 'uncertain until resistance has emerged against a previous generation of drugs'. Therefore except for patients with infections that are resistant to previous generations of drugs, a new antibiotic is 'most probably no better than any existing and cheap generic on the market'. By the time a new antibiotic becomes the standard first line of care, it might be near or beyond the end of its patent life. This means the pharmaceutical company which developed it 'will struggle to generate enough funds to recoup its development costs'.
The report says the antibiotics pipeline needs to be radically overhauled and it has put forward costs modelled on achieving 15 new antibiotics each decade over the next 20 years, of which at least four should be breakthrough products targeting the bacteria of greatest concern.
The report calculates that a buyout model which adequately rewards and incentivises the developers of these 15 new products would cost between US$1.6bn and $3.7bn a year globally.
Mark Lloyd Davies, Chair of the ABPI Antibiotic Network, has welcomed the report, but has called for more details on how these funds will work, as well as on how the potential gaps in the funding would be tackled.
'For example, while the global innovation fund would encourage early stage research and development, this would yield new treatments years from now. It is therefore important to also recognise the value of existing antibiotics and those in late stages of development,' he said.
'There are also issues to resolve about how the global reimbursement fund will work – who will pay for it? How will new antibiotics be judged to be of sufficient value to access the fund?'
