Dear All (lots and lots of wonkish detail here, be sure your blood caffeine level is adequate!), During the 24-28 Aug 2020 BEAM Alliance-sponsored AMR Conference (go here or see below my signature for more), I had the opportunity on 27 August to chat with Sumati Nambiar (FDA) and Marco Cavaleri (EMA) about ongoing regulatory activities. The
Dear All (with thanks to Kevin as the lead author on this note and also with a wonkish note alert … refresh your coffee and settle in!), Several years ago, DRIVE-AB planted some seeds across Europe on reforming how we pay for antibiotics. As a consequence, we are seeing some hopeful sprouts in several countries: Previous newsletters
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 alert … the first 3 segments are non-wonkish but the last 2 are in the wonkish zone … titrate your plasma caffeine level appropriately), Part 1: FDA has recently released a draft guidance entitled Development of Anti-Infective Drug Products for the Pediatric Population (link). This timely guidance builds on related guidance documents
Dear All (wonkish note alert … top-up your coffee and settle in!), Today we have a tour of a recent paper in Clinical Infectious Diseases in which FDA presents a very instructive analysis of endpoints used in recent CABP (Community-Acquired Bacterial Pneumonia) trials and how data such as these might permit further convergence of global
Dear All (and with thanks to Kevin Outterson for co-authoring this newsletter), Just out in CID is a paper in which FDA analyzes trends in antibacterial development from 1980-2019. To fully appreciate this paper, you need to look both at it and three other papers: FDA’s paper (https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa859): Dheman N, Mahoney N, Cox EM, Farley
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 (detailed and wonkish note alert … lots of thinking out loud … get some coffee and settle in!), I wrote previously (link) about FDA’s planned workshop on animal models to support antibacterial development and I was able to listen to the workshop via webcast. As brief context (and please be sure to look
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, (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.“ You might also enjoy the discussion of AI-supported discovery in this May 2026 video from