Antibiotic resistance is taking its toll on the pharmaceutical industry: Drugs are getting retired from clinical circulation, because many have basically been rendered ineffective, according to an article from Washington University of St. Louis. It highlights the work of WUSTL’s Michael Kinch, associated vice chancellor of its Center for Research Innovation in Business:
The number of antibiotics available for clinical use, Kinch said, has declined to 96 from a peak of 113 in 2000.
The rate of withdrawals is double the rate of new introductions, Kinch said. Antibiotics are being withdrawn because they don’t work anymore, because they’re too toxic or because they’ve been replaced by new versions of the same drug. Introductions are declining because pharmaceutical companies are leaving the business of antibiotic discovery and development.
Kinch uncovered this info in his former role as managing director of the Center of Molecular Discovery at Yale University, where he’s created a catalogue outlining all the FDA-approved antimicrobial drugs. An arsenal of new antibiotics proliferated between the 1960s and the 1990s, the Drug Discovery Today report says, but has started to decline thanks to “obsolescence and resistance.” The WUSTL article continues:
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Pfizer or its predecessors developed 40 of the 155 antibiotics ever sold in this country, Kinch said, but is no longer in the antibiotic space. Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb have also left the antibiotic field, which is now dominated by small companies such as Cubist Pharmaceuticals, formed in 1992 specifically to focus on drugs for resistant bacterial infections that could have higher price points.
Kinch says the threat of patent cliffs is making pharma companies less willing to embark on creating a new antibiotic:
Because of rising resistance doctors hold new antibiotics in reserve, using them only in cases of dire need. This happened, for example, in the case of vancomycin, which has long been used as a drug of last resort. “When you hold a drug in reserve,” Kinch said, “you’re eating into the patent time a company has to recoup its development costs.”
“If you’ve got this vancomycin-like situation, where the drug is sitting on a shelf—quite literally sitting on a shelf—how is a company going to make its money back? It can’t price the drug at $10,000 a dose.” Companies have consistently decided there is no exit from this trap – as long as we hold to the current model for drug development.
