Lhe World Day for the Prevention of Antimicrobial Resistance, held on 18 November, alerted us to this growing health threat considered by international authorities to be one of the major global health priorities of this century.
Antibiotic resistance is likely to jeopardize decades of medical advances, including practices in surgery, neonatology and resuscitation, cancer treatments such as chemotherapy, and organ transplants. It is estimated that antibiotic resistance causes 35,000 deaths per year in the United States, 33,000 in Europe and 5,500 in France. In 2019, it was attributed 1.27 million deaths worldwide.
Faced with this scourge, the findings of the World Health Organization (WHO) are alarming: “The clinical pipeline for new antimicrobials is dry. » The WHO in 2019 identified only 32 antibiotics in clinical development that meet its list of priority pathogens, of which only 6 were classified as “innovative”. In addition, the international body is alarmed by the shortages of antibiotics affecting countries at all levels of development.
Promising tracks abandoned
It is doubtful that the current research and development (R&D) model, based on the financial choices of pharmaceutical multinationals, is able to fully meet the challenges. For example, promising leads in the development of new antibiotics have, in the recent past, been abandoned. Like the one pursued by the firm Achaogen, which had developed, thanks to English and American public and charitable money, a new promising antibiotic in the face of resistance in the treatment of urinary and kidney infections, plazomicine. Despite obtaining a marketing authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, the American regulator, in June 2018, the firm did not attract stock market investors. In 2019, Achaogen, forced into bankruptcy, had to abandon plazomicin, which was never marketed.
Generally speaking, the desertion of pharmaceutical multinationals from areas of research that do not guarantee short-term returns on investment compromises an appropriate response to this public health problem. Moreover, and even if the development of new antibiotics could make it possible to temporarily respond to antibiotic resistance, the arrival of new chemical molecules will not make it possible to deal with the problem in depth, or only partially and temporarily.
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