AMR Action Fund: A $1b down payment from Industry; A call for creation of strong Pull incentives

“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion” (Paulo Coelho)

Dear All,

The AMR Action Fund (https://www.amractionfund.com/) announcement today was awesome … indeed, it brought tears to my eyes.

I listened in parallel to the presentations from Berlin and Washington where we had an all-star cast of US Senators, EU Members of Parliament, Health Ministers, Finance Ministers, private foundations, corporate CEOs, patient advocates (and a very moving personal patient story), physicians, and more. 

For those of you who missed it, here’s the quick story (full press release is here, the YouTube channel with video replays is here, and a follow-up newsletter is here):

• A $1b fund created by 20+ global pharma: Almirall, Amgen, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Chugai, Daiichi Sankyo, Eisai, Eli Lilly & Co., GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, LEO Pharma, Lundbeck, Menarini, Merck, MSD, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Pfizer, Roche, Shionogi, Takeda, Teva, and UCB 
• Goal #1: Bring 2-4 new antibiotics through Phase 2-3 and to approval for use in patients by 2030
• Goal #2: Work to create market conditions that enable sustainable investment in antibiotics.

In short, this is a Push incentive like CARB-X or Novo REPAIR, but for Phase 2-3. And it comes at a critical time as it is currently effectively impossible to raise money to advance any of the promising candidates in the global pipeline beyond Phase 1 … having seen the market collapse of 1/3rd of the antibiotics approved in the past decade has soured the entire investment community. 

Critically, the AMR Action Fund is not a complete fix but rather it is a clarion call for action by governments to create the strong Pull incentives that will sustain new antibiotics in the marketplace (see this newsletter for more details). Unless those Pull incentives are created, the situation a few years from now will look like this:

• The AMR Action fund will have brought new drugs through Phase 2-3 to approval, but
• Those drugs will not be available because the companies behind them will be bankrupt, and
• COVID-19 will be under control, but we’ll still have 700k+ dying each year from antibiotic-resistant infections.

Are Pull incentives possible on the needed scale? So far, only the UK has stepped forward (link) … will others follow? I do think so … and as you listen to the replays of the event that will soon be posted (and I encourage you to listen to both the Washington and the Berlin events … the content is similar but meaningfully different), please note carefully the breadth of voices. Finance Ministers! Senators! Members of Parliament!

We’ve worked now for 10+ years to raise awareness and understanding (go here for a list of the prior reports) and now it is time to use those insights to implement strong Pull incentives.The fact that our non-medical political leadership understands this problem is the key to ensuring that the next steps are taken. 

Finally, a specific shout-out to Thomas Cueni, Director General of IFPMA. He started pushing for this last year and it has been his leadership that helped everyone deliver this magnificent aligned vision and initiative. Thank you, Thomas!!

Wow! Wow! Wow! This $1b down payment from Industry will buy us some time in which to create those Pull incentives and ensure that we have a sustainable pipeline of new #FireExtinguishersOfMedicine!

All best wishes, –jr

John H. Rex, MD | Chief Medical Officer, F2G Ltd. | Operating Partner, Advent Life Sciences. Follow me on Twitter: @JohnRex_NewAbx. See past newsletters and subscribe for the future: https://amr.solutions/blog/. All opinions are my own.