Antimicrobial resistance is steadily narrowing our ability to treat infections, while the development of new antimicrobials remains challenging. New incentives could help revitalise innovation—but their design will determine whether they create a diverse pipeline and a sustainable ecosystem or inadvertently favour only the first product to reach the market.
The first treatment available is not necessarily the best treatment for every patient—or even the best treatment in the long term.
Different patients may require different treatments because of allergies, toxicity, drug interactions, physiology or metabolism. And even when a first-in-class antimicrobial addresses an important unmet need, subsequent products may offer meaningful improvements in safety, efficacy or convenience.
A diverse pipeline also matters for the future of combination therapies, which may be essential to treating difficult-to-treat infections and limiting the emergence of resistance.
Our new paper, Patient benefit as a guiding principle for the development of new antimicrobials, argues that every promising antimicrobial should be viewed as a potential contribution to the future treatment armamentarium: In other words, having several treatment options is not redundancy. It is a clinical necessity.
Innovation policy should be guided by one fundamental question: how can we ensure that patients continue to have effective treatment options, today and tomorrow?
Read the full paper to explore why patient benefit, rather than a winner-takes-all approach, should remain at the heart of antimicrobial innovation policy.
Read the full paper here
