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
Notes: Newsflash … BARDA have opened their long-running BAA-18-100-SOL-00003 to include support for antifungal agents. Search for “antifungal” in the posted .pdf to find the text. The first deadline for proposals is 15 Dec 2022 and further deadlines will doubtless follow: as shown on page 9, this BAA has offered 4 deadlines/year since 2018! Dear All, In
Dear All (long, wonkish note alert!): Today we have a 3-part discussion of cost and value with this summary 3-part message: Developing antibiotics is expensive, Not having antibiotics is even more expensive, and We have to solve this! First, what does it cost to bring a new antibiotic to market? To start us off, we
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 want to review XKCD on the importance of good apple stewardship (link). With thanks to Natalie Ma for sharing this, All best wishes, –jr
Dear All (wonkish note alert!), The recent newsletter on chemicals, drugs, and halicin (link, see also a follow-up newsletter here) generated significant discussion and new insights that I thought I would share in a follow-up newsletter. Our theme in Part 2 is “Trust, but verify!” Let’s start by considering comments on the newsletter. A number of
This newsletter has a follow-up here and here. Dear All, Today’s theme is a 3-part journey that could be subtitled “Many are called, but few are chosen,” or “It’s easy to kill bacteria — steam, fire, and bleach are consistently effective — but those aren’t drugs!” Our first stop is with a very old compound, bacitracin.
Dear All, The Duke-Margolis team hosted an excellent full-day workshop on 16 Jan 2020. Entitled “Exploring Opportunities to Reform Antimicrobial Payment and Post-Market Incentives” and chaired by Mark McClellan, the workshop’s outstanding cast of presenters and discussants provided a thorough discussion of both the need for new payment models and and the many ongoing activities focused
Note: See also these related newsletters: 20 Feb 2020 (link) on DTR as part of the language of resistance and 7 June 2020 (link) on using DTR to estimate antibiotic value. Dear All: When thinking about studies of resistant pathogens, issues of case-finding and statistical design are frequent topics of debate. As an example, the
There is a follow-up to this note. Go here to read it. Dear All: I don’t like writing about doom and gloom, but a sequence of events in the past few days really drives home both the importance of the work we do to create new antibiotics as well as the fragile state of the ecosystem supporting
Dear All, Non-traditional alternatives to antibiotics have excited a lot of interest in the past few years but we’ve seen relatively few of these progress in a meaningful way (go here for Pew’s recent survey of the development landscape). Providing insights into the challenges of this area, two valuable and complementary articles on non-traditional antibiotics have recently
