{"id":39503,"date":"2025-12-29T19:24:02","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T19:24:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/?p=39503"},"modified":"2025-12-29T19:24:02","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T19:24:02","slug":"the-guardian-view-on-antibiotics-recent-breakthroughs-are-great-news-but-humanity-is-losing-the-bigger-race-editorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/?p=39503","title":{"rendered":"The Guardian view on antibiotics: recent breakthroughs are great news, but humanity is losing the bigger race | Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"

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D<\/span>uring her tenure as director general of the World Health Organization, Dr Margaret Chan used to say that all\u00a0of the \u201ceasy\u201d antibiotics had already been found. Her point was that in responding to the urgent\u00a0threat of antibiotic-resistant infections, we would struggle to\u00a0find new medicines \u2013 or preserve the ones we have \u2013 if we didn\u2019t find new ways of working. She was right.<\/p>\n

Since 2017, just 16 antibiotics have gained widespread regulatory approval \u2013 mostly close relatives of medicines already in use and so unlikely\u00a0to\u00a0evade resistance for long. The development\u00a0of new ones is a slow and unprofitable business, curative medicines being less lucrative than ones treating longer-term conditions. And the scientific outlook remains bleak.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the announcement this month of two new US Food and Drug Administration-approved antibiotics against gonorrhoea is good news and, crucially, validates a new way of incentivising research. One of the new drugs, Zoliflodacin, is the product of a novel kind of partnership between the Swiss non\u2011profit Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP) and the pharmaceutical company Innoviva. GARDP provided\u00a0funding and organised clinical trials to defray\u00a0costs and clear regulatory hurdles. Such assistance upfront helps direct the industry towards\u00a0areas of greatest global need.<\/p>\n

This approach and the UK government\u2019s lauded \u201csubscription model\u201d \u2013 launched in 2022 to guarantee\u00a0revenue to companies that invested in certain antibiotics \u2013 represent the best hope of maintaining a dripfeed of new drugs out of the\u00a0current system.<\/p>\n

But even hurrying the production of drugs that are currently in development isn\u2019t enough. Zoliflodacin is sometimes described as a new class of antibiotics, meaning one that targets a part of the infectious bacteria that no other drug does, theoretically forcing the pathogen to start from zero in evolving a countermeasure to it. Scientists and doctors are relieved to have a new drug for gonorrhoea \u2013\u00a0which has resistant strains against every known antibiotic \u2013 but caution that future resistance to Zoliflodacin is inevitable.<\/p>\n

As has become the norm with new antibiotics, there is therefore an argument about whether it should be held in reserve, rationed to highly resistant infections only \u2013 limiting its use to where high\u2011end lab testing is available. This sort of rational approach should be the worldwide norm, but often can\u2019t be deployed easily in the global south.<\/p>\n

More broadly, it is hard to see where the stream of other new antibiotics we need could possibly come from. Dr Chan\u2019s comment nodded to the fact that surveying the living world for natural sources \u2013 as with penicillin \u2013 has had diminishing returns. Use of artificial intelligence has been mooted to speed up the discovery process, although a much-celebrated early candidate called halicin, identified in 2020, hasn\u2019t yet progressed past animal trials. Synthetic drugs, which are mainly or fully lab-created, are constantly in development, but often run up against\u00a0the iron laws of chemistry \u2013 just because we imagine a molecule doesn\u2019t mean we can\u00a0synthesise\u00a0it\u00a0easily.<\/p>\n

The prevailing scientific evaluation is that when it comes to antibiotics, we must run very fast indeed just to stay in the same place. Careful internationally coordinated use is the only way to preserve our advantage. Sadly, the scale of future breakthroughs is going to seem miserly compared with the curative bonanza of the 20th century.<\/p>\n