‘The silent pandemic’ — AMR: Developing new antibiotic drugs, or not

Americans are inundated with ads to “ask your doctor” about the latest medicine to treat a condition. But there are far fewer, if any, suggestions to ask your doctor about antibiotics. Why is there so little public attention about development of new antibiotic drug? Jason G. Newland, MD, MEd, division chief of infectious diseases for Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, discusses drug development in the context of antimicrobial resistance, a growing problem across all of health care.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Medical Economics: Currently, we know there's a constant stream of newly developed drugs because Americans are inundated with advertisements telling us to ask your doctor about various medicines. But it seems like that's not always the case with antibiotics. In your view, what are the factors affecting the development of new antibiotics?

Jason G. Newland, MD, MEd: I so appreciate this question. This is an important piece of our ongoing efforts. As you mentioned right there, a lot of these medicines we see on TV are for chronic conditions, right? Whether we've seen people with obesity and the new GLP-1, obesity has been a chronic condition, or it's a diabetic medicine, or it's high blood pressure, these are typically medicines that you might be on for a long time. That's different when we talk about antibiotics. Antibiotics, for the most part, are finite, meaning we are going to use them for a specific amount of time. We also know that we have put in place in our country and actually around the world, programs to help clinicians who are caring for people to have these conversations, so that we use the antibiotics appropriately, because unlike some of these other medicines, like a blood pressure medicine, you don't become resistant to that medicine at times. But a bacteria becomes resistant, so we might have to change. And so we have to continue to develop new antibiotics, because some of them are going to go away because the bacteria change. Therein lies the problem is that financially, if you're a company, you might not have that incentive to want to make an antibiotic that might go away soon, that's not going to be used for a long time. And so what are these models? And I think that's where it's a struggle.