More participants in the antibiotics sector are compelled to exit as financial outlook persistently goes bleak. The trend is particularly alarming because the threats of superbugs or antibiotic-resistant bacteria grow by the hour.
Even if there are a few pharmaceuticals that are willing to continue with the costly antibiotic development, their investors are the ones reluctant to give support. With little to no new funding at all, observers now fear that crisis is only waiting to happen, according to The New York Times.
Startups Achaogen and Aradigm, both pharma startups, filed for bankruptcy in recent months. Not even the big players withstand the challenge of costly antibiotic development.
Giants Novartis and Allergan chose to abandon antibiotic developments. AstraZeneca and Sanofi had long exited the sector with other big names hinting about insolvency most recently. Melinta Therapeutics had sounded off an alarm about running out of budget.
The only participants continuing in the antibiotic sector are Merck, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer. Still, it may not be long before they give up as there had only been 12 antibiotics that were approved since 2000.
The problem with antibiotics is that pharma finds it hard to keep the profit going. Antibiotics are only prescribed for a limited period compared to medicines for heart diseases and diabetes. On the other hand, it takes as much as $2.6 billion for a company to develop antibiotics.
The looming crisis in the antibiotic sector is rooted in a dilemma that is hard to resolve. In the past years, people and doctors abused antibiotics. Many doctors are found to have prescribed the wrong dosage of antibiotics while many patients failed to take the medicine as prescribed.
Such practice resulted in bacteria and diseases resistant to biotics or what is now popularly called as superbugs. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 2.8 million people in the United States who are suffering from drug-resistant infections annually as of 2019. The infections caused 35,000 deaths already. If the trend continues, drug-resistant infections could cost governments around the world about $100 trillion in medical spending by 2050. A separate report from the United Kingdom found that superbugs could kill 10 million people yearly by 2050.
With the emergence of superbugs, doctors are now extremely careful about prescribing antibiotics. Pharmacies are also strictly monitoring their dispersal of the medicine. While the intentions are good to combat highly resistant antibiotics, this move strangles the antibiotic sector, hence, the number of exits of bankruptcies.
What's happening now is a seemingly endless loop in the problem: doctors strictly prescribed antibiotics, leaving pharmaceuticals out-of-budget, but then there is a need for antibiotic developments since the threat of superbug is growing, but then again superbugs are caused by abuse of antibiotic.
