$1 billion reward proposed for development of new antibiotics

follows the biomedical industry, is skeptical about the impact of the market entry reward. “Most large pharmaceutical companies will not find the $200 million per year for 5 years to be highly attractive, and all the less so to the extent they may obligate themselves to longer-term money-losing supply undertakings,” Gordon said.

Other incentives in the DRIVE-AB proposal include grants for research and development given to academic and research institutions, small biopharmaceutical companies, and drug discovery units of large pharmaceutical companies; pipeline coordinators that track antibiotic development, identify gaps, and provide funding and technical support to fill those gaps; and a long-term supply continuity model to support a predictable supply of important but rarely used antibiotics.

The authors say these incentives are designed to be complementary and together form an “ecosystem” that will maximize their effectiveness. They estimate an annual cost for the combined proposals of $1 billion, with the financing coming from governments and philanthropic organizations. They recommend that the recently announced G20 Global R&D Collaboration Hub on AMR be considered to coordinate the effort.

Call for pharma to do more
In one of the two other reports, which was released yesterday, the Access to Medicine Foundation compared how a cross-section of the pharmaceutical industry is responding to the AMR threat, measuring the 30 most active companies in antibiotic development and production for their research and development efforts, approaches to ensuring that antibiotics are accessible and used wisely, and policies for ensuring responsible manufacturing. The report found that, of the 28 antibiotics for high-priority pathogens in late-stage development, only 9 are truly novel and only 2 are supported by plans to ensure they will be used wisely and be made accessible.

“While the economics are complex, we need more industry leaders, more pharmaceutical companies, to develop new antibiotics to replace the ones that no longer work, and find new, responsible ways to produce them and get them to the patient,” Access to Medicine Foundation Executive Director Jayasree Iyer, PhD, said at a World Economic Forum press conference.

In addition, the report found that fewer than half of the companies are involved in efforts to track patterns in antibiotic resistance, eight companies are setting limits on the levels of antibiotics that can be released into the environment, and four companies are taking steps to separate sales bonuses from the volume of antibiotics sold.

CIDRAOP notes that a report last week from the AMR Industry Alliance—a collection of more than 100 companies and trade associations representing the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, generics, and diagnostics industries—concluded that while industry investment in AMR-related research and development is significant and has boosted the pipeline of new antibiotics, it’s not enough. The group characterized current research and development incentives as insufficient, and said many companies might withdraw from antibiotic development if new incentives aren’t created.

— Read more in Charles Årdal, et al., Drive-AB Report: Revitalizing the antibiotic pipeline Stimulating innovation while driving sustainable use and global access, Executive Summary (Drive-AB, 2018); 24 January 2018 University of Geneva press release; 23 January 2018 Access to Medicine Foundation Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark 2018; 18 January 2018 AMR Industry Alliance progress report’ and “Report tracks industry progress on drug resistance,” CIDRAP (18 January 2018)