• Question: The increased resistance in bacteria (MRSA and VRSA etc.) is making research and development of new antibiotics less economically appealing for pharmaceutical companies as they may work for only a short time, therefore not making as much money as other possible medication (e.g. anti-depressants) that could be funded instead. How do you think this problem could be overcome?

    Asked by Catherine to Ceri, Marikka, Matt, Rob, Sally on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Sally Cutler

      Sally Cutler answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      What thoughtful comments. Unfortunately there is a lot of truth in what you say. This is even more true for vaccines where you may only need one dose to give life-long protections whereas a heart medication or other such treatments may need to be taken daily for the rest of your life and thus make much more money for the pharmaceutical companies. Also, most infections are in developing countries that have little finance to pay for such treatments. Thankfully policy makers are now putting more research funding into development of new antibiotics and alternative therapies, but this has taken a long time in coming and would still not support the pharmaceutical developmental stages.

    • Photo: Robert Hampson

      Robert Hampson answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Yes, antibiotics may only work for a short time as resistance emerges.

      Yes, they only require maybe a two weeks worth of drugs to treat infections as opposed to years to treat heart disease reducing the potential sales of antibiotics in comparison to other drugs.

      However, what is really killing the viability of antibiotic research at the moment, is the fact that hospitals and the NHS keep new antibiotics in reserve as a back up and only use them to treat resistant bacteria. This is a fantastic strategy for reducing resistance to these drugs. However, this means that new antibiotics (which costed countless millions to develop) only sell maybe 50 courses of treatment to each hospital which then sit on a shelf for ages only being used very rarely. Companies cannot sell enough to recoup their investment so they don’t bother investing in the first place.

      One of the strategies currently being tried is funding by central government (e.g. academia works on developing new drugs). However, with the highest respest for academia, they are not experienced at bringing new drugs to market through all the regulations and red tape. It would be much better if we could encourage pharmaceutical companies to do this themselves.

      A strategy to try to do this which is currently running is the idea of a central prize fund. The UK government recently offered the 2014 Longitude prize (worth £10,000,000) to anyone who can help with antibiotic resistance. However, in terms of drug development, this isn’t really very much money.

      The final idea that many people have suggested is that when people start dying people will be willing to pay alot more for antibiotics, so then the market will start to produce them and there will be no problem. However, many people will probably die in the gap etween when people are willing to pay and when the pharmaceutical companies finally bring the new drugs to market so I don’t think that is the greatest idea really.

      I think the best idea at the moment is bigger prizes…

    • Photo: Ceri Dare

      Ceri Dare answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      This is a good and complicated question. I am working on making existing antibiotics last longer and be more effective, instead of new antibiotics, because even when we do have new antibiotics they will be really expensive and poor countries won’t be able to afford them.

      The short but complicated answer to your question is that our political and financial systems are broken. They don’t support the people who need most help – for example ‘neglected tropical diseases’ which affect many people in poor parts of the world don’t have much research done on them. Even where we have cheap treatments which already work for these diseases, then not everybody who needs it gets the treatments http://www.who.int/neglected_diseases/diseases/en/

      There are various ideas around to support the development of new antibiotics, like government-funded research and prizes. But the real problem is that the way we organise society is broken.

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