European Union Pharmaceutical Package: A Summary

Today I’m turning this post over to some of my FTI colleagues in Europe (Antoine Mialhe, Katja Murray and Valeria Fagone among others) who helped summarize the Reform of the EU pharmaceutical legislation that the European Union (EU) adopted on April 26, 2023. The summary below is provided by the FTI Consulting team in Brussels…

$1 billion antibiotic venture fund launched

Antibiotic resistance is a problem. One study from Europe found that in 2015 there were 33,110 deaths attributable to antibiotic resistance; accounting for morbidity as well, antibiotic resistance lead to a a decrease of 874,541 disability-adjusted life years. CDC data show that antibiotic resistant bacteria and fungi caused 35,900 deaths in 2019, 12,800 deaths due…

Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance

O’Neill Commission has identified a number of recommendations to tackling drug-resistant infections. Seth Seabury and Neeraj Sood have their own thoughts on how to incentivize the development of antibiotics to fight antimicrobial resistance (AMR) which they describe in an interesting article in the Health Affairs blog. They write: The US patent system incentivizes innovation by…

The future of humanity

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has an interesting post about his conversation wtih Nick Beckstead regarding perspectives on existential risk and other long-run issues for humanity.  Existential risk?  Is that really an issue?  Humans dominate the globe! Well, that is the case now but it may not always be the case.  For instance, in recent years, the population…

Are we running out of antibiotics?

Nicole Allan of the Atlantic discusses why overuse of antibiotics is making them less effective.  The fact that antibiotics are less effective did not come as a surprise to many experts.  In fact, in 1945, “while accepting a Nobel Prize for discovering penicillin, Alexander Fleming warned of a future in which antibiotics had been used…

A lifeline for antibiotics research?

Antibiotics such as penicillin have helped to fight numerous diseases such as syphilis, and infections caused by staphylococci and streptococci.  However, overuse of antibiotics is a problem.  Physicians sometimes prescribe antibiotics to fight viral infections even though antibiotics are only effective against bacterial infections.  Because of this overuse, more and more strains of drug-resistant bacteria are appearing.…