Many of the existential threats we face today may well be solved by technology but, for that to happen, there needs to be both innovation and the necessary funding to ensure that this promise becomes a reality. Over the past few years money has flowed into fields such as net zero, agritech, AI, healthy ageing and vaccines development, giving hope that climate change, global pandemics and resource constraint will become forgotten problems for our children’s children.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – the increasing emergence of microbial strains that are resistant to antibiotics – however, has historically been a chronically under-funded field. The current model for drug development requires high levels of private sector investment to get products over the line and approved for use. Investors need worthwhile incentives and while highly priced patent-protected drugs provide this, new antibiotics often do not. This is because a new antibiotic will usually be kept in reserve, to be used only when other products have failed, resulting in low sales volumes. As a result, big pharma has largely moved away from developing new antibiotics and there has been a shortage of investment in start-up biotechs too. Simply put, companies making oncology drugs raised around $7bn in 2020, while companies making antibiotics raised just $160m.
All of this means that, while there have been 164 FDA-approved, direct-acting antibacterial new chemical entities (NCEs) since the early 1900s, only one new molecular target NCE has been approved during the last 35 years. Unless there are fundamental changes to the innovation model for antimicrobials – and soon – we are simply not going to be able to tackle the threat that AMR poses to society. According to a recent study in The Lancet, in 2019 an estimated five million deaths were associated with AMR and this is predicted to rise to ten million by 2050.
And yet, perhaps helped by the memory of the chaos that infectious diseases can cause to society, in the post-pandemic world there are a number of positive developments. Earlier this month, some of the UK’s leading authorities in the field of AMR gathered in the heart of Liverpool’s Knowledge Quarter to discuss not only the threat we face, but also some novel solutions. Here are five key points (and reasons to be cheerful!) from Bionow’s Bioinfect 2024 conference.
Read the article in full here.
