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By that do you mean the trials, safety testing and licensing side of it, or the way drug companies approach new drug development? I've never quite understood w
by anexprogrammer 10y ago
By that do you mean the trials, safety testing and licensing side of it, or the way drug companies approach new drug development?
I've never quite understood why we can't approach new antibiotics like we have with many enzymes - lab forced evolution. That manages to produce dozens of new ones for food, washing powder and the like, so antibiotic discovery seems like an excellent place to use it.
- chris_va 10y agoThat doesn't really work unless your antibiotic is going to be a short chain peptide, which might find something but would be extremely unlikely. Besides, fungi/bacteria have been waging this evolutionary war for a billion years, and we haven't tapped much of anything past beta-lactam (ala penicillin) from that arms race.
- danieltillett 10y agoThe whole regulatory system is not designed with antibiotics in mind. One of the biggest problems is if you bring a new antibiotic to market the doctors will be reluctant to use it as they will want to keep it for those emergency cases when all the other antibiotics don't work. As a pharmaceutical company you have put an enormous amount of money into developing a new drug and them nobody buys it. Rather than go down this path most of the pharma companies have just decided to produce the the things we really need like erectile dysfunction drugs.