The worrisome antibiotic resistance

And if humanity fell into the health situation that prevailed before the discovery of penicillin, the first antibiotic discovered in 1929 by British physician Alexander Fleming? This catastrophic scenario, given the millions of lives saved by these anti-infective drugs, comes from researchers gathered on Sunday in Boston (USA) on the occasion of the 50th annual conference of the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC).

On the one hand, the number of cases of multidrug-resistant bacteria, against which there is no more effective antibiotic, is growing both in rich countries and in developing countries. In Europe, these "super" bugs are already responsible for 25,000 deaths per year.

Moreover, a recent study has noted the emergence in India and Pakistan, XDR strains of bacteria that could colonize the planet in a few years, starting with the United Kingdom which has maintained close ties with its former colony.

On the other hand, "it is clear that the pharmaceutical industry does not meet the needs of medicine", lamented to the press Dr. Ursula Theuretzbacher, Centre anti-infective agents in Vienna.

In ten years, the number of new products or antibiotics in development has fallen by half, agreed Gary Noel, the U.S. Laboratory Johnson and Johnson. According to this expert, there would be no more than fifty of antibiotics in the study throughout the world in the laboratories and biotech companies. More worryingly, "the few molecules potentially able to neutralize microbial MDR will not be on the market earlier than two to four years," says Mr. Noel.

The low profitability of antibiotics, compared to cancer, psychotropic drugs (antidepressants, anxiolytics...) or drug against cardiovascular disease, explains this trend.

To break the impasse, Dr. Theuretzbacher proposes to no longer rely solely on the model of ROI, but expand, including the creation of partnerships between public and private sectors, like the ones successfully cooperating against certain tropical diseases.

The government should allocate more funds to cover the shortfall in private investment in the early stages of research and development of new antibiotics. Meanwhile, the infectious disease emphasizes the need to strengthen and harmonize the countries' legislation to limit the overuse of antibiotics in humans but also in animal husbandry, the main cause of development of microbial resistance.

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