Innovation is key to new antibiotics against AMR.

In 2016, the United States National Security Council drew up a playbook on fighting pandemics so that the next response to an epidemic was better handled than the response to the spread of Ebola. The same year, the G7 put tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on the agenda.

Today, the twin global health security threats of viruses and bacteria are very real.

Every corner of our health system depends on antibiotics. It’s thanks to antibiotics that illnesses such as pneumonia, meningitis and TB are now treatable. They are used for caesarean sections, routine operations such as arthroscopic knee surgery, and cancer chemotherapy.

Worryingly, bacteria mutate, just as viruses do. As a result, increasingly people are dying of diseases where the existing antibiotics did not work. Since 2016, over 3.5 million people have died of a drug-resistant infection.

Overuse of antibiotics and declining investment in research for new and novel drugs are the causes of this pandemic hidden in plain sight. Without urgent action, 10 million people globally could die annually as a result of AMR by 2050.

The question is, how to make sure that one goes from policy papers, dire projections and simulations to action? In the case of Covid-19, against the odds and in record time, we already have a range of vaccines to protect against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The speed of the response is thanks to decades of research on vaccine technologies.

In contrast, research for new antibiotics that could stave off the worst of AMR has been stuck in the doldrums. And whilst there are exciting signs at the early end of the pipeline, this innovation is primarily happening in small companies without the infrastructure to take a promising product all the way to market.