There is rising tide of drug-resistant microbes that is thought of as one of the greatest threats to public health today, yet the pipeline of new antibiotics is dwindling. Here, Dr Peter Jackson, executive director of the AMR Centre, which is spearheading the UK’s response to AMR, discusses what action is needed to support the pharmaceutical industry in this fight.
alarm bells
For many years now, the alarm bells have been sounding on the dwindling pipeline of new antibiotic treatments. Antibiotic patent applications worldwide have dropped by over a half in the past decade and there are fewer new drugs emerging from clinical trials, with only two new molecular entities approved by US regulators between 2008 and 2012, down from 16 in the early 1980s. Most worrying of all, there have been no new classes of antibiotics introduced, effective against the most serious Gram-negative infections, in over 30 years.