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Regulatory News: Challenging Antibiotic Resistance

28th May 2012

On 24 May 2012, the European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative announced a new 7-year plan which will battle against superbugs.  The 'NewDrugs4BadBugs' programme is supported by a €233.7 million budget. 

The initiative hopes to bring together a collaboration of experience in research and development (R&D) that aims to move past current duplication and avoid reinventing the wheel.  Moving past this could help improve the focus of research whilst private and public cooperation could help speed up the discovery of new drugs.  Academic researchers and non-profit organisations are also needed in the collaboration in order for the plan to succeed.

Each year drug resistant infections cost the EU over €3bn as a result of hospital stays, medical treatment and lost productivity and 25,000 people are estimated to die as a result of them.  Multi-strain resistant infections are an incredibly troublesome cause for illness in the developed world.  Antibiotics were once hailed as radical recovery treatments to bacterial infection but as evolution has taken its own historic course, bacteria have managed to overcome the challenge posed by modern medicine. 

It has been nearly 30 years since a new effective antibiotic has been introduced to the EU market.  Although antibiotics are crucial drugs they provide a low return for pharmaceutical companies. 

The Innovative Medicines Initiative’s injection of funding will challenge the R&D of pharmaceutical companies to involve themselves more heavily, but if the risk of sharing information is not spread equally the attempt may fail to produce results.  The key to the success of this project is cooperation from industry, academia and government agencies.  Patients should be eager to see where this leads so that they can feel safer being treated.

Reviewed by Mike May, Regulatory Affairs Executive