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.
To incentivize drug development without encouraging overuse, the report promotes an idea gaining popularity in antibiotics: "de-linking" a drugmaker's profits from the drug's sales. Such strategies aim to give companies assurance that they will make money if they bring valuable new antibiotics to market, regardless of the number of pills prescribed right away.
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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by WillAdams on Friday May 15 2015, @02:17PM
First, ban their use save when personally prescribed and administered by a doctor or veterinarian.
Second, rotate out a given drug while it's still effective (before resistance has been bred into bacteria) — this probably needs to be done on a global scale
Third, continue to develop new drugs and add them to the rotation — periodically drugs should be omitted from being rotated in and the rotation should be randomized in some non-repeating fashion
We really should be smarter than microbes, so we should be able to work up an effective, long-term strategy and implement it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2015, @11:50PM
First, ban their use save when personally prescribed and administered by a doctor or veterinarian
First, weed out all the spineless physicians who will write a prescription for an inappropriate drug just to get rid of a whiny patient with a (viral) cold.
Once you have all the Andrew Wakefield types with no ethics barred from practicing medicine, then we might be able go to your plan.
-- gewg_