Stimulating Antibacterial Research and Development: Sense and Sensibility?

Abstract

There is a clear consensus in the medical community that there is a growing unmet medical need for novel antibacterial drugs; however, at the same time, there has been a clearly demonstrated futility in the discovery and the development of novel antibiotics. In the late 1940s through the mid 1960s, the largest groups in many (if not most) pharmaceutical companies were those researchers engaged in antibacterial drug discovery. Groups that numbered greater than 500 at many companies, using mainly phenotypic screening technologies, were able to discover and develop scores of novel agents, many of which are still used today as workhouse drugs. The poor antibacterial pipeline today, which Patricia Bradford and I reviewed in 2007 [1] and has improved not one whit in the past 3 years, is a reflection of two phenomena, reduced industrial research activity and poor levels of funding for academic research [2, 3]. The Infectious Diseases Society of America has called for “10 by 20,” but from my perspective we would be fortunate to see three novel antibiotics approved in that time frame, and the reality is that if those novel drugs are not in development this year (2010), then there is little chance they will receive regulatory approval by 2020.