3 ms·
New antibiotics are high on the list of things that are needed, but they will only be used as treatment of last resort, this is where the traditional investment
by HarryHirsch 9y ago
New antibiotics are high on the list of things that are needed, but they will only be used as treatment of last resort, this is where the traditional investment model fails. Development is too expensive to ever recover the outlays.
Right now science can't do anything about the high failure rates in Phase II and Phase III trials. The problem isn't to come up with a compound against your target of choice, it's that apart from clinical trials we don't have a way to predict if in real life it will perform better than placebo (Phase II) or adequately (Phase III).
- Fomite 9y agoWhile commonly used as an example, I'll note this isn't actually even always true for antibiotics. The development of Fidaxomicin/Difficid is actually an example of a fairly inexpensive clinical trial (by clinical trial standards), and Merck didn't buy Cubist for $9.5 billion for a drug they don't think will recover their outlay.