Antibacterial
agents in clinical development – an analysis of the antibacterial clinical
development pipeline, including tuberculosis, launched today by WHO
shows a serious lack of new antibiotics under development to combat the growing
threat of antimicrobial resistance.
Most of the drugs currently in the clinical pipeline are
modifications of existing classes of antibiotics and are only short-term
solutions. The report found very few potential treatment options for those
antibiotic-resistant infections identified by WHO as posing the greatest threat
to health, including drug-resistant tuberculosis which kills around 250 000
people each year.
"Antimicrobial resistance is a global health emergency
that will seriously jeopardize progress in modern medicine," says Dr
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO. "There is an urgent
need for more investment in research and development for antibiotic-resistant
infections including TB, otherwise we will be forced back to a time when people
feared common infections and risked their lives from minor surgery."
In addition to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, WHO has
identified 12 classes of priority pathogens – some of them causing common
infections such as pneumonia or urinary tract infections – that are
increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics and urgently in need of new
treatments.
The report identifies 51 new antibiotics and biologicals in
clinical development to treat priority antibiotic-resistant pathogens, as well
as tuberculosis and the sometimes deadly diarrhoeal infection Clostridium
difficile.
Among all these candidate medicines, however, only 8 are
classed by WHO as innovative treatments that will add value to the current
antibiotic treatment arsenal.
There is a serious lack of treatment options for multidrug-
and extensively drug-resistant M. tuberculosis and gram-negative pathogens,
including Acinetobacter and Enterobacteriaceae (such
as Klebsiella and E.coli) which can cause severe
and often deadly infections that pose a particular threat in hospitals and
nursing homes.
There are also very few oral antibiotics in the pipeline,
yet these are essential formulations for treating infections outside hospitals
or in resource-limited settings.
"Pharmaceutical companies and researchers must urgently
focus on new antibiotics against certain types of extremely serious infections
that can kill patients in a matter of days because we have no line of
defence," says Dr Suzanne Hill, Director of the Department of Essential
Medicines at WHO.
"Research for tuberculosis is seriously underfunded,
with only two new antibiotics for treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis
having reached the market in over 70 years," says Dr Mario Raviglione,
Director of the WHO Global Tuberculosis Programme. "If we are to end tuberculosis,
more than US$ 800 million per year is urgently needed to fund research for new
antituberculosis medicines".
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