Quote: (02-13-2012 11:53 PM)WesternCancer Wrote:
also to add to gringochileno's point
"Drug companies have little incentive to put money into R&D for new antibiotics. Antibiotics don't tend to be very good money-makers because you prescribe them once, finish the course, and then you're done with them. The big bucks are in medications for chronic diseases which have to be taken for years or even a lifetime, and as you can guess a disproportionate amount of funding goes into researching new medications of this kind at the expense of drugs that are sorely needed but not as profitable. The result is that there are very few new antibiotics coming online while resistance continues to march forward. I think we need an aggressive program of subsidies to counteract this similar to the orphan drug program that provides funding for treating very rare diseases."
Its also not worth it in many cases for drug companies to make antibiotics because bacteria will become resistant so quickly to it due to the other points mentioned. The extreme amount of money it costs to produce a new antibiotic causes them to just not put much money into research, because of this people give the antibiotic companies bad reps claiming its greed. If they can't make an antibiotic that is useful for a long enough period to warrant the production of more/new antibiotics there is no point to make new ones. The company will fail and any other possible beneficial drug they could have made won't be made.
Quite right. It actually gets worse, though. The new antibiotics that come out are usually used extremely sparingly as "drugs of last resort" in order to keep resistance from developing. Of course, patent protection only lasts for so many years, so by curbing the drugs' usage at first we severely limit the amount of money the pharmaceutical company can make on them since they're not able to sell enough of the drug during the patent protection period to recoup their R&D expenses. Ironically, more responsible usage practices designed to preserve the drugs' effectiveness winds up diminishing the incentive to develop new drugs. Yet another reason why the need for new antibiotics will always outstrip the incentive for companies to develop them without an aggressive subsidy program.