New report says pharma companies make more money from other drugs, so shy away from new antibiotic development
December 16, 2014 | and |
The true cost of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) will be 300 million premature deaths and up to $100 trillion (£64 trillion) lost to the global economy by 2050.
The true cost of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) will be 300 million premature deaths and up to $100 trillion (£64 trillion) lost to the global economy by 2050. This scenario is set out in a between now and 2050.
This issue goes beyond health policy and, on a strictly macroeconomic basis, it makes sense for governments to act now, the report argues. "One of the things that has been lacking is putting some pound signs in front of this problem," says at the Farr institute, University College London, UK, who sees hope in how a response to HIV came about. "The world was slow to respond [to HIV], but when the costs were calculated the world leapt into action."
He recently totted up R&D for infectious diseases in the UK and found : £102 million compared to a total of £2.6 billion. Other research shows that less than 1% of available research funds in the UK and Europe .
"You can look at antibiotic resistance as a slow moving global train wreck, which will happen over the next 35 years," says health law expert at Boston University, US. "If we do nothing, this report shows us the likely magnitude of the costs."
Outterson headed up a recent on new business models for antibiotics that highlighted the problem of inadequate market incentives. "If I came out with a new cardiovascular drug, it could be worth tens of billions of dollars a year," he says. "But if we had the same innovative product as an antibiotic, we would save it for the sickest and it would sell modestly in the first decade. So market uptake is extraordinarily limited for innovative antibiotics and all for excellent public health reasons."
Another approach is to re-use old drugs. "Developing new antibiotics will take many years and we cannot wait," says at the Center for Anti-Infective Agents in Vienna, Austria. "In the meantime we decided we need to improve the usage of some selected old drugs that had not been in use for many years." An EU-funded project, , is running clinical trials on five drugs developed before the 1980s.
Theuretzbacher has been pleased by public money going into helping small companies move their innovative antibiotics towards market. In the US, companies such as Achaogen, Cempra and Trias, acquired by , have made use of these schemes. Meanwhile, in Europe, there are several EU funded projects, Wellcome Trust schemes and public–private partnerships such as the and its programme.
, health systems economist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK, was a member of the RAND team and adviser to KPMG. He says the report’s headline figures are not an exaggeration and are more likely an underestimate. "It takes into account effects on labour productivity and labour workforce issues, but we don’t know what the public reaction will be: from previous pandemics and outbreaks we know behavioural effects can be much worse on an economy than the impact of the disease," he says. The report concluded that they "most likely underestimate the true costs of AMR" due to a lack of reliable data.
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