- Title: Drug firms urged to "pay or play" on new antibiotics
- Date: 19th May 2016
- Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK (MAY 14, 2015) (REUTERS) PHARMACISTS TAKING ANTIBIOTICS FROM SHELF PHARMACISTS HOLDING ANTIBIOTICS
- Embargoed: 3rd June 2016 17:49
- Keywords: UK government-commissioned review proposes charge drug companies levy fund development new antibiotics tackle global threat antimicrobial resistance
- Location: No-Data-Available
- City: No-Data-Available
- Country: United Kingdom
- Topics: Economic Events
- Reuters ID: LVA0064IH6LON
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Drug companies should agree to "pay or play" in the urgent race to develop new antibiotics to tackle a global threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), according to a British government-commissioned review.
Led by former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill, the review said every sector affected by the growing threat of superbug infections - from patients, to doctors, to governments, to the healthcare industry - must be forced "out of its comfort zone" if the issue is to be successfully tackled.
"One of the things that was striking when I started this is that the scientific knowledge of the few that know about it is pretty strong; so how come nothing has changed? And the answer to that is people don't want to get out of their comfort zone. So, everybody's got to get out of their comfort zone - pharmaceutical companies, policy makers, the agricultural industry. And what we're proposing are things that are going to require people to get out of their comfort zone," O'Neill said after he presented a final report from his team's 18-month review.
This should include pharmaceutical companies, O'Neill said, which should be subject to a surcharge if they decide not to invest in research and development (R&D) to bring successful new antibiotic medicines to market.
For those who decide to "play", he added, a reward of between $1 billion and $1.5 billion should be paid for any successful new antimicrobial medicine brought to market.
"An idea that we call 'pay or play'; where the pharmaceutical industry itself collectively pays for the new drugs. But crucially, those that are personally responsible for the new successful drug actually get rewarded by the rest of the industry. And we think that has some very interesting characteristics that have appeal," he said.
He repeated the review's previous estimation that AMR could kill an extra 10 million people a year and cost up to $100 trillion by 2050 if it is not brought under control.
DISCUVA, a company from Cambridge, England, makes and tests antibiotics for superbugs. It employs around twenty staff and has various partnerships with bigger pharmaceutical companies.
"What's happening out there in the bacterial communities is that the bacteria are becoming more resistant to antibiotics that we have in practice at the moment," said David Williams, CEO of DISCUVA. "The reason for that is we are using a lot of them and bacteria don't want to be killed, so they're evolving. The statistics that the Jim O'Neill team have come up with are conservative. They're real. They are not exaggerations, that is what we are seeing. We are seeing it today, we are seeing it in our hospitals."
O'Neill was asked last year by Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron to conduct a full review of the problem and suggest ways to combat it.
Launching his final report, O'Neill said it had identified 10 areas where the world needs to take action. Some of these focus on how to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics, while others look at how to increase the supply of new ones.
However, the drugs industry hit back at a proposal saying charging a levy would "undermine goodwill".
Trade associations representing British, European and international drug companies said in a joint statement that such a surcharge would be "punitive" and counter-productive.
But for some antibiotics are essential.
"Antibiotics are vital, it's life and death for us. An infection could be the end. You could have an infection which means you can't come back from that or the condition gets so bad antibiotics just won't help anymore, so having antibiotics everyday keeps us at an equilibrium," said cystic fibrosis sufferer Michael Winehouse.
The world has seen very few new antibiotics in the past few decades, as industry has retreated from the field to focus on more profitable disease areas, although recently there has been some increase in investment, prompted by the superbug threat. - Copyright Holder: FILE REUTERS (CAN SELL)
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