Image: Microbe World/Janice Haney Carr, CDC [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0], via Flickr
Swiss company’s studies of drug candidate show promise in tackling drug-resistant bacteria
Reports of a potential new class of treatments for bacterial infections have sparked fresh calls for a revamp of policies to incentivise the development of additional novel antibiotics.
On 3 January, the journal Nature published two studies reporting that a class of compounds shows promise as treatments for infections with drug-resistant strains of the bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii (pictured), which are on the World Health Organization’s list of priority pathogens.
In one of the studies, scientists from the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche found that a drug candidate from the new class of antibiotics, zosurabalpin, was effective at “overcoming existing antibiotic resistance mechanisms” in laboratory and animal studies.
The study authors Michael Lobritz, Kenneth Bradley and colleagues said the class of antibiotics “represents a promising treatment paradigm for patients with invasive infections”.
According to a December report in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, Roche has also completed two phase-one clinical trials on the drug involving 64 male and female participants.
New policies needed
The rise of drug-resistant bacteria is widely considered one of the world’s most pressing public health challenges, but discovery of new antibiotics has been hampered by a lack of incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop promising new drug candidates.
In an editorial accompanying the studies, Nature warned that, without a “strategic funding plan”, drug candidates like zosurabalpin “could be sitting on the shelf for years”.
The editorial says there has been “more talk than action” by governments, highlighting that the EU has been “unable to pass relevant legislation”.
In June last year, the Council of the EU member state governments adopted a recommendation to advance the bloc’s actions to combat antimicrobial resistance. This included a plan from the European Commission to design a “multi-country pull incentive scheme” that EU member states could voluntarily use to reward companies for developing successful antibiotics.
In November, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations said any such scheme would need a “sufficiently large incentive promoting sustainable innovation” and that “it is crucial that any proposed model is both feasible and implementable within the EU legal framework, avoiding further delays in action”.