The future of antibiotics

Antibiotic resistance continues to spread even as society is experiencing a market failure of new antibiotic research and development (R&D). Scientific, economic, and regulatory barriers all contribute to the antibiotic market failure. Scientific solutions to rekindle R&D include finding new screening strategies to identify novel antibiotic scaffolds and transforming the way we think about treating infections, such that the goal is to disarm the pathogen without killing it or modulate the host response to the organism without targeting the organism for destruction. Future economic strategies are likely to focus on ‘push’ incentives offered by public-private partnerships as well as increasing pricing by focusing development on areas of high unmet need. Such strategies can also help protect new antibiotics from overuse after marketing. Regulatory reform is needed to re-establish feasible and meaningful traditional antibiotic pathways, to create novel limited-use pathways that focus on highly resistant infections, and to harmonize regulatory standards across nations. We need new antibiotics with which to treat our patients. But we also need to protect those new antibiotics from misuse when they become available. If we want to break the cycle of resistance and change the current landscape, disruptive approaches that challenge long-standing dogma will be needed.