R&D Insight

Natural product-inspired antibiotics: 1943-2025

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

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18-19 Nov 2019 FDA-IDSA-NIH-Pew Workshop: Enhancing Antibacterial Trials in the US

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

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ATMF on Access in LMICs/Progress, but wishing for more

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

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Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027: Calls of interest!

Dear All, Our colleagues in Europe have been busy! Along with yesterday’s announcement about transferrable exclusivity vouchers, we also had publication of the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027. It’s a really big program that includes within its Cluster 1 a trio of calls of interest to readers of this newsletter: HORIZON-HLTH-2027-01-DISEASE-08 call seeks projects developing

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Two new oral drugs for gonorrhea!

Dear All (wonkish … but worth it … get ready to follow the links!), Greetings in the new year! As a marvelous way to end the last year, the US FDA announced on 12 Dec 2025 its approval of two new oral therapies for gonorrhea, thus addressing the priority pathogen lists of both WHO (High

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Discussing Details of ATMF’s 2021 AMR Benchmark Report!

Dear All, As you may remember, last fall I wrote a newsletter about ATMF’s 3rd update to the AMR Benchmark series. You are encouraged to read the report but in brief, the key messages are (i) the pipeline is small with most innovation coming from small biotech, (ii) stewardship and access planning are increasingly seen (but access itself

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EPA (Part 4): Further resources

This is the fourth of a 5-part newsletter series. There is an initial 27 Sep 2023 newsletter introducing the EPA concept note, 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, and a fifth newsletter (11 Oct 2024) about the EPA’s collaborative framework for evaluating the AMR

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