Dear All, No one is safe until we’re all safe! In the 7 April 2025 newsletter on antibiotic access (“UNSLAP: You reach for the antibiotic … and it’s not there!”), Louise Norton-Smith and I concluded that we need to work to address all the elements of the long and delicate supply chain from manufacturing to local
This newsletter is part of a series — here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, (this one is Part 3), Part 4, and Part 5. Dear All, As a coda to the two newsletters on Chemicals, Drugs, and Halicin (link and link), XKCD gets the final word: Image reproduced with permission from https://xkcd.com/1217/. And, you might
Dear All, In a report entitled Understanding the Antibiotic Manufacturing Ecosystem: A view of global supply chains, pressure points, and implications for antimicrobial resistance response, the Boston Consulting Group and Wellcome Trust have examined at length the questions of (i) how the #FireExtinguishersOfMedicine are made and (ii) how they can be made with the least impact
Dear All (with thanks to Vega Masignani for co-authoring this newsletter), While the work needed to create new antibacterial agents is the primary topic of this newsletter, the need for vaccines of all types is definitely part of our community’s joint remit. As discussed in the 29 Mar 2021 newsletter (“Vaccines to turn back the
This is the first of a 5-part newsletter series. There is a second (28 Sep 2023) newsletter that expands on the EPA concept note, a third (12 Jan 2024) newsletter about ending the use of streptomycin spray on citrus crops, a 4th newsletter (27 Jan 2024) containing some additional resources, and a fifth newsletter (11
Note: See also these related newsletters: 13 Jan 2019 on DTR as part of the language of resistance, 7 Jun 2020 on using DTR to estimate antibiotic value, and 25 Apr 2025 on evolving the idea of DTR to include antibiotic access. There is also a 5-minute DTR explainer on YouTube that you might find useful.
Dear All, In a paper that is clearly a labor of love (1,032 references!), Mark Butler and Robert Capon have summarized the history of 217 natural product-inspired antibiotics across 16 classes from penicillin to fidaxomicin! Here are the links you need: Butler MS, Capon RJ. Natural product inspired antibiotics approved for human use – 1943
Dear All, Long note alert: Set aside at least 30 minutes for this one … there’s a lot of important material here. Last week’s workshop entitled “Enhancing the Clinical Trial Enterprise for Antibacterial Drug Development in the United States” was an unusual and unusually instructive meeting. You can go here for the meeting materials but as there are
Dear All, Please mark your calendar now to be in the Washington, DC area on 18-19 Nov 2019 for a 2-day workshop at FDA’s White Oak Campus focused on enhancing the clinical trial enterprise for antibacterial drug development. Jointly co-sponsored by FDA, IDSA, NIAID, and Pew Trusts, this meeting will have a particular focus on (a)
Dear All, Last fall, the team at ATMF (Access to Medicine Foundation) released the 3rd update to the AMR Benchmark series and Damiano de Felice was a guest author for a newsletter about the findings. That report offered a wealth of granular data, in-depth analyses and revealing graphs about what pharmaceutical companies in the global antibiotic and