Antibiotic Development May Not be Bad Business for Drugmakers

By Reuters Staff

NEW YORK - Drug companies have tapered the development of new antibacterials amid uncertainty about their profit potential, but a look at the history of these drugs shows they sell well in most cases, researchers say.

"In the presence of a public health need, antibacterial agents that targeted emerging multidrug-resistant bacteria quickly found their market and reached annual worldwide sales of US$500 million or above, sometimes reaching the 'blockbuster' threshold of US$1 billion for worldwide sales annually before the 10th full year after their launch," Drs. Dominique Monnet and Johan Giesecke of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm, Sweden, write in a letter to the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, online December 16.

They mention examples of profit-makers starting with the 1985 release of the first carbapenem, the beta-lactam antibiotic imipenem/cilastatin, developed in response to emerging resistant bacteria at the time. Eleven years later a second carbapenem, meropenem, was approved. Both drugs are still sold today.

Other examples include piperacillin/tazobactam, approved in 1993, linezolid, approved in 2000 as the first oxazolidinone and daptomycin, approved in 2003 as the rst lipopeptide.

There may be only one compound that has not reached $500 million in sales, and that is tigecycline, approved in 2005 as the first glycylcycline.

"This observation goes against the common view that new antibacterial agents have a small potential market of less than US$500 million annually. It provides an insight into what would be the potential market, considering the current public health need and current economic model, for a novel antibacterial agent active against carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative bacteria," the researchers write.

Dr. Monnet was unable to comment on the findings by press time.

SOURCE: https://bit.ly/JfmLfi

J Antimicrob Chemother 2013.

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