Why New Antibiotics Never Come To Market (vice.com)

citadrianne writes: New antibiotics are generated naturally over time by bacteria, as weapons in their ongoing chemical warfare against other microbes. Predicting where and when they can be found relies mostly on good fortune and following a hunch. Scientist Brian Murphy's hunch is that the bacteria which live on freshwater sponges could be a hive of new chemicals. "We don’t know a huge amount about these species," he said. "But the only way to find out if there’s anything there is by actually diving down there and carving them off with a knife." But even if these sponges yield the antibiotics of the future, there are seemingly endless roadblocks that prevent us from actually using them to cure disease. "We've discovered six antibiotics in the recent past," Professor William Fenical said. "Of those, three to four have serious potential as far as we know, including anthramycin. But we have no way to develop them. There are no companies in the United States that care. They're happy to sell existing antibiotics, but they're not interested in researching and developing new ones."

Comments

Of course not

[khelms]

The pharmaceutical companies aren't interested in developing inexpensive drugs you take a few times and then are done with. They want to develop something you have to take for the rest of your life to treat a chronic condition and charge as much as they can get away with. That's why both new antibiotics and new vaccines are seldom developed.

Americans pay far more for their prescription drugs than the rest of the world and the excuse is that we're funding "innovation". Most of the innovation going on seems to be coming up with slight variations of existing drugs in order to extend the copyright and doing their best to delay a generic version of a drug from being marketed.

Even when a generic version of a drug appears, greed is often in play. Just a month or two again, this was in the news "The rights to Daraprim were purchased in August by a new company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, which promptly increased the price from $13.50 per tablet to $750 per tablet -- a 5,000 percent jump -- the New York Times reported."

I talked to a doctor about this one

[phantomfive]

I talked to a doctor about new antibiotics. The problem is you won't make your money back from them. A company has to go through all the trials to prove that the new antibiotic is safe, and than enough people need to buy them to make it worth it. In the case of antibiotics, there are so many already on the market that doctors won't use the new antibiotic, they'll just use existing ones.

Note this only applies to antibiotics......if there were a drug curing malaria or AIDS, it would be a different story.

Re:You must choose....

[gtall]

Roughly 25 years ago, I did work on a system that went to a major drug company. I learned that at that time, it cost roughly $1 billion to get a new drug to market. Of the hundreds of candidates that they would start testing, only 1 or 2 would have the right properties of not killing the patient, not having horrible side effects, etc. And the documentation required by the regulators would fill several semis, because it isn't enough to prove to yourselves that you have a wonder drug, you must prove it to the regulators. This is to prevent Joe's Bait and Pharmacology Shop from putting snake oil on the market. Once on the market, your drug must compete against others. And if those others are in their generic phase, you can express pricing pressure as well.

Then the market for the drug must be assessed. In the case of antibiotics, there are many of them out there, many in generics, so bringing a new one on the market is destined to not sell well...at least as long as too many people aren't dying from super-bugs.

This is a prime area for government research and development. The conservatives and libertarians will whine about the fed. gov. getting into the drug business. However, this is what we expect our government to do, i.e., make up for the shortfalls of private industry. The way I look at it, private industry has a big tote board. When frequency of deaths due to super-bugs rise above a certain level, they'll move. Until then, the conservatives and libertarians will gladly attend your funeral...just kidding, they don't give a flying rat's ass about you.

I'm confused

[LunaticTippy]

I keep hearing about how there are no new antibiotics, but I never really looked into it. A quick gooble search found 36 new antibiotics currently in development. Some of them are combinations of existing antibiotics (a promising but not very innovative approach) and some of them are new molecules.