Hi, I’m an EA working in a prominent antibiotics resistance lab. From my point of view, antibiotics resistance is a big issue, resistance is growing, HOWEVER, there are actually a lot of medications in the pipeline that are effective but weren’t brought to market because it’s not financially viable right now (that I heard in a talk by Floyd Romesberg). There are also other interesting therapies like antimicrobial peptides (explanation here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15761415 ). My lab developed an ML model that will help doctors in Israel select the most optimal antibiotic (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0503-6 ) and also sequencing is getting so good that it’s not improbable that in 10 years, IF THERE WILL BE A NEED you’d come to the Doctor, he’ll swab you and get a full antibiotics resistance profile, and prescribe you a medication accordingly.
The reason that these medications and technologies aren’t implemented is that antibiotics resistance is still more or less manageable, it is not at a crisis level. Unlike pandemics, a global antibiotics resistance crisis doesn’t rise in one day (though it is quick! there was essentially very little 70 years ago) so that means that was the situation to become worse, it is possible to draw on all these technologies to form some sort of defense. However, it is true that many people die of antibiotics a year and it will likely affect developing countries disproportionately. All in all, it is true that antibiotics resistance is a threat, but it’s just not a GBCR.
This fits with my general impression that biosecurity experts in EA (at OpenPhil, FHI, and elsewhere) don’t generally consider antibiotic resistance to be a top-priority threat.
Reading this question made me realise that I don’t have a very detailed understanding of why that is. What you describe sounds like an important part of it.
Hi, I’m an EA working in a prominent antibiotics resistance lab. From my point of view, antibiotics resistance is a big issue, resistance is growing, HOWEVER, there are actually a lot of medications in the pipeline that are effective but weren’t brought to market because it’s not financially viable right now (that I heard in a talk by Floyd Romesberg). There are also other interesting therapies like antimicrobial peptides (explanation here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15761415 ). My lab developed an ML model that will help doctors in Israel select the most optimal antibiotic (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0503-6 ) and also sequencing is getting so good that it’s not improbable that in 10 years, IF THERE WILL BE A NEED you’d come to the Doctor, he’ll swab you and get a full antibiotics resistance profile, and prescribe you a medication accordingly.
The reason that these medications and technologies aren’t implemented is that antibiotics resistance is still more or less manageable, it is not at a crisis level. Unlike pandemics, a global antibiotics resistance crisis doesn’t rise in one day (though it is quick! there was essentially very little 70 years ago) so that means that was the situation to become worse, it is possible to draw on all these technologies to form some sort of defense. However, it is true that many people die of antibiotics a year and it will likely affect developing countries disproportionately. All in all, it is true that antibiotics resistance is a threat, but it’s just not a GBCR.
This fits with my general impression that biosecurity experts in EA (at OpenPhil, FHI, and elsewhere) don’t generally consider antibiotic resistance to be a top-priority threat.
Reading this question made me realise that I don’t have a very detailed understanding of why that is. What you describe sounds like an important part of it.
Do you have a link to the talk? That goes against what I have read elsewhere.