Dear All (and with thanks to Kevin Outterson for doing the heavy lifting on this note), As you may recall, the US National Action Plan for Combatting Antimicrobial Resistant Bacteria (US NAP CARB) was launched in 2015 on the heels of the 2013 CDC report on antimicrobial threats (link to that report) and is/was a
Dear All (wonkish but intended for everybody to read and absorb): 27 Jan 2021 update: This topic now has its own YouTube video! As the ideas here are VERY confusing, I suggest you make the time to watch the video, read the newsletter, and then watch the video one more time. I have yet to
Dear All (and with thanks to Kevin for leading the charge on this newsletter), While listening to last week’s BEAM-sponsored AMR Conference (really a wonderful conference, thank you Team BEAM, go here to listen to the sessions), we tumbled onto a really, really disturbing trend: New antibiotics are not being registered or sold in Europe in
Dear All (with thanks to Kevin Outterson for co-authoring this newsletter), Last week’s announcement of the AMR Action Fund was both exciting and sobering: $1b from 20+ pharma companies to fund antibacterials through Phase II-III to approval, with a goal 2-4 high quality new agents by 2030. If you missed it, please go here to
Dear All (wonkish note alert — refresh your coffee before proceeding — with thanks to Kevin Outterson for co-authoring this note!), The intertwined questions of (i) the cost to develop a new antibiotic and (ii) how much we should pay for such a new antibiotic have been an increasingly frequent newsletter topic, with a real
Dear All (and with thanks to Kevin Outterson for co-authoring this newsletter), The recent discussions of the NICE/NHS England pilot subscription model (detailed newsletter plus follow-up FAQ newsletter) and a new paper by Chantal Morel and colleagues on the idea of an Antibiotic Susceptibility Bonus (ASB, link) bring to the fore the question of how to value any given
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
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
This newsletter is part of a series — here are the links to Part 1, (this one is Part 2), Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. Also relevant is the 5 April 2024 newsletter entitled “48,015 → 0: Antibacterial Discovery Is Hard. Really, Really Hard.“ Dear All (wonkish note alert!), The recent newsletter on chemicals, drugs, and halicin (link, see
This newsletter is the first of a series — here are the links to Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. 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 —