44 ms·

I've been under the impression that we don't have new antibiotics because it is not economically viable. When you invent new weight loss drug you can sell mill

• ac2u 3y ago
  >it is immediately classified as "reserve antibiotic" and the sale is restricted. Is that so medical professionals can break it out as a means of last resort to save a patient and ensure the course is finished? If so that mightn't be a bad idea before we destroy the potential of new antibiotics too by having the general public misuse them render them useless over time.
  • zbrozek 3y ago
    It's probably a good idea. But doing that alone--without substituting market incentives with something else--means that there won't be new products to use in that way.
  • garrisonhh 3y ago
    I think the above commenter is just pointing out how the fundamental conflict between these two things results in significantly lessened incentive for pharmaceutical companies to put money into researching new antibiotics
    • schneems 3y ago
      I extremely know nothing about this field. Would a naive approach would to have a coordinated “crop rotation” type tactic where all hospitals switched to a primary antibiotic every C years/months do anything?
      • RiDiracTid 3y ago
        Empirically, many bacteria seem to be able to acquire resistance in a way that doesn't significantly impact their fitness, meaning they can basically get new resistances and keep old ones for almost arbitrarily long, so the crop rotation idea would fail massively. https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/35/5/901/2680377 https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/35/5/901/2680377
        • schneems 3y ago
          Good to know, thanks for the explanation!
        • Log_out_ 3y ago
          It has costs. Replication gets more expensive and slower, more error prone. Also bacteria exchanges resistance DNA among itself. Would be a cool vector to give them weekness.
  • zdragnar 3y ago
    There's a secondary consideration as well; designing new chemicals is fairly easy, synthesizing them harder, and scaling that to commercial manufacturing very hard. Oh, and you still have to prove it to be safe and effective through years of clinical trials. AI is basically still only helping us with the easiest parts, and this particular class is drugs is essentially a limited resource (to avoid force-evolving stains of bacteria that are resistant or immune). At the end of the day, there's not as much research because there's a finite amount of resources to go around and there are easier / lower hanging fruit.
  • Log_out_ 3y ago
    Restricted? As in used by vetrinarys and cure for all in the poorer parts of the world? Also good if there is something to stop hospital bacteria eating patients in slices. Wish we had a wheel of antibiotics, were resistance makes the bacteria vulnerable to something on the opposite of the wheel.
• Waterluvian 3y ago
  It requires a socialized solution: to fund it for future needs rather than for profits.
  • marcusverus 3y ago
    A government which can't regulate effectively can't be trusted with a monopoly. Anyway, how does holding antibiotics in reserve help anything? Why let the bugs evolve resistance to one antibiotic at a time, rather than hitting them them with multiple antibiotics and thus raising the evolutionary hurdle to resistance? Was this strategy designed by the bad guys in a Jacky Chan movie?
    • wolverine876 3y ago
      Whatever the theory, the government achieves quite a bit. Look at NASA, as one example, not to mention nuclear energy in all its applications, etc.
      • travoc 3y ago
        70-80% of NASA's budget is spent on contracts with commercial companies, research institutions, and other external organizations.
        • wolverine876 3y ago
          I'm not sure how that matters. The commercial companies also subcontract.
      • marcusverus 3y ago
        SpaceX created a reusable first stage in ~10 years, for less than NASA spends in a single year. In that same time period NASA spent a quarter of a TRILLION dollars… to send out a handful of probes. NASA does interesting things, sure, but nothing that the private sector couldn’t do in half the time for 1/10th the sticker price. The government may have contributed to the discovery of nuclear power, but for the last 50 years it has been the largest impediment to nuclear power.
• bannedbybros 3y ago
  [dead]
• UncleOxidant 3y ago
  This is good example of the limits of capitalism.
  • rjtavares 3y ago
    The whole concept of patents already is a solution to one of the limits of capitalism (they're basically government enforced monopolies). There are interesting ideas on how to improve the system, hopefully we won't throw the baby with the bath water here.
  • fasterik 3y ago
    I think capitalism has plenty of solutions for this. We can allocate government funding for research, pass new laws that create tax incentives, create prize funds to incentivize development of specific drugs, or make advanced market commitments where institutions commit to buying a portion of a certain type of drug after it's produced. The underlying problem is the lack of political will and cooperation to implement these solutions.
    • UncleOxidant 3y ago
      > I think capitalism has plenty of solutions for this. We can allocate government funding for research ... Market-driven capitalism without any government incentives (or disincentives) has no answer here. You just proposed something that's not market-driven capitalism. That the government should get involved in some way to fund and incentivize what it deems to be good for society in the long run. The market on it's own can't do this.
      • fasterik 3y ago
        It's a straw man to define capitalism in such a way that anything involving a government doesn't count as capitalism. Unless they're radical anarcho-capitalists, most people would agree that you need some sort of stable society with laws and regulations for markets to function correctly.
        • 3y ago
• WorkerBee28474 3y ago
  > If you invent new antibiotic it is immediately classified as "reserve antibiotic" and the sale is restricted. Are there examples of this? I've heard people say this happens, but I've never heard a concrete example. I googled 'reserve antibiotic' and found Ceftobiprole, and see it's for sale for $40,000/gram, so clearly it's possible to charge money for a 'reserve'.
  • scotty79 3y ago
    That's probably the only good reason to allow exorbitant prices for this specific kind of medicine. To keep it in reserve while keeping pharma companies incentivised.
• bilsbie 3y ago
  The headline says this is the first one in 60 years so I’m not sure how you can suggest this pattern.