More than 150 industry groups urge Congress to act on antimicrobial resistance

2022-11-16

It’s lame duck season, and a group of more than 150 industry advocates is bringing antimicrobial resistance to legislators’ attention. A suite of pharma companies and organizations signed a letter on Wednesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell in support of the PASTEUR Act, which would establish a program to address the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. Merck, the AMR Action Fund, CARB-X, Genentech, Seres Therapeutics and BIO are among the signatories. For David Hyun, director of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Antimicrobial Resistance Project, the proposed legislation is all about “fixing the broken pipeline for new development of antibiotics.” “Antimicrobial resistance is already here,” he said. “On the flip side of this, we don’t have enough antibiotics. We’re running out of antibiotics and the antibiotic development pipeline has not been able to keep up.” Despite a rising threat of antimicrobial resistance, Big Pharma has essentially retreated from the risk field, where many antibiotics either fail in development or wither on the vine due to a lack of available funding. “Even when you have a successful, new antibiotic that comes onto the market, the drug companies and other researchers that have invested a lot of money into it are not able to recuperate that,” Hyun said. By 2050, experts guess antimicrobial resistance could lead to as many as 10 million deaths per year. The AMR Action Fund, backed by a handful of Big Pharma companies, made its first investments to kick-start new development earlier this year, and the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) released draft guidance suggesting a Netflix-style subscription model in which the country would pay a fixed fee of up to £10 million ($13 million) per year for access to Pfizer’s Zavicefta (ceftazidime/avibactam) and Shionogi’s Fetroja (cefiderocol), regardless of how much is actually prescribed. Industry advocates in the US are pushing for something similar. As the letter to legislators states: “I don’t think we’re at a point where we’re beyond the point of no return when it comes to antibiotic resistance,” Hyun said. “There’s still plenty of time, which is why organizations like us at Pew and Infectious [Diseases] Society of America are strongly advocating for this.”

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