SoylentNews

frojack writes:

The problems of developing new antibiotics is that it is a never ending technology race.

New drugs are targeted at those areas where there are a sufficient number of patients to (eventually) pay for the cost of development. Only when existing drugs no longer are effective (due to resistant strains of infectious agents), will doctors prescribe newer more expensive drugs. Some antibiotics and antivirals will end up being niche drugs, for those with special needs.

These situations can lead to an inability to recover developmental costs before the patent expires

This means, the developers are tempted to keep the prices very high. Unfortunately, this discourages use and doctors refuse to prescribe the drug. Some drug companies launch a massive advertising campaign to pump up sales before the patents can expire. This encourages over use, which detracts from the useful life of the drugs.

Too many drug companies therefore, have started shying away from expensive development on a drug that will never make money for them.

ScienceMag features a story on a UK Government proposal for a global government administered program that would guarantee drug developers a profit, rather than extending patent length.

The new report full text pdf here estimates that the world needs 15 new antibiotics per decade, at least four of which should have new mechanisms of action to target the most harmful pathogens.

Toward that end the UK plan would create a $2 billion "global innovation fund," bankrolled by pharmaceutical companies to kick-start development of promising drug studies.

• They propose a system by which a global organisation has the authority and resources to commit lump-sum payments to successful drug developers, irrespective of current sales.
• Secondly, they would also jump-start a new innovation cycle in antibiotics by getting more money into early stage research by boosting funding for blue-sky research into drugs and diagnostics.
• Finally they propose to further reduce barriers to drug development by lowering costs, improving the efficiency of research, and lowering global regulatory barriers wherever possible without compromising patients' safety.

They suggest that a comprehensive package of interventions could cost as little 16 billion USD and no more than 37 billion USD over the course of 10 years and would be sufficient to radically overhaul the antibiotics pipeline.

Presumably such a program would come with some requirement to keep prices low, or require them to license others to manufacture the drugs at reasonable royalty rates well before the patents expire.