Do you also plan to try to tackle the problem of antibiotic overdose, which also leads to AMR, and is especially rampant in India?
For any illness, bacterial or not, doctors in India typically prescribe antibiotics. The reasons for this are largely social; an antibiotic serves to eliminate any bacterial disease if somehow undiagnosed, and patients typically recover from their illnesses within the prescription period, so the doctor is judged “good” by patients. This increases the reputation and hence income of the doctor. Pharmaceutical companies reinforce this system, providing incentives to doctors for them to prescribe their antibiotics.
This ecosystem would continue to pose significant risks even if novel and better antibiotics are developed, and then made available and affordable in LMICs like India.
Thanks for the comment, ensuring better stewardship, especially in countries such as India, is definitely a really important part of combating AMR but it’s not something we’re planning to work on directly in the near term. The main reason for this is that as a small organisation we want to keep a narrow focus on what we think will be the most tractable option for us to have a big impact. Development of new antimicrobials seems to be a good option for this as they will always be needed, regardless of improvements to stewardship and given the lag from a policy passing to us actually seeing high-value antimicrobials on the market is likely to be at least 10 years, this felt extremely pressing to us.
We also think that new antimicrobials will play an important role in supporting stewardship and we’re particularly interested in policies that can enable this. The policies we support would reduce the incentives for pharmaceutical companies to make money through sales as you’ve mentioned, although, they don’t fully tackle the overprescribing or misprescribing issue. Additionally, more specific antimicrobials combined with better diagnostics should also help in reducing this issue.
Do you also plan to try to tackle the problem of antibiotic overdose, which also leads to AMR, and is especially rampant in India?
For any illness, bacterial or not, doctors in India typically prescribe antibiotics. The reasons for this are largely social; an antibiotic serves to eliminate any bacterial disease if somehow undiagnosed, and patients typically recover from their illnesses within the prescription period, so the doctor is judged “good” by patients. This increases the reputation and hence income of the doctor. Pharmaceutical companies reinforce this system, providing incentives to doctors for them to prescribe their antibiotics.
This ecosystem would continue to pose significant risks even if novel and better antibiotics are developed, and then made available and affordable in LMICs like India.
Thanks for the comment, ensuring better stewardship, especially in countries such as India, is definitely a really important part of combating AMR but it’s not something we’re planning to work on directly in the near term. The main reason for this is that as a small organisation we want to keep a narrow focus on what we think will be the most tractable option for us to have a big impact. Development of new antimicrobials seems to be a good option for this as they will always be needed, regardless of improvements to stewardship and given the lag from a policy passing to us actually seeing high-value antimicrobials on the market is likely to be at least 10 years, this felt extremely pressing to us.
We also think that new antimicrobials will play an important role in supporting stewardship and we’re particularly interested in policies that can enable this. The policies we support would reduce the incentives for pharmaceutical companies to make money through sales as you’ve mentioned, although, they don’t fully tackle the overprescribing or misprescribing issue. Additionally, more specific antimicrobials combined with better diagnostics should also help in reducing this issue.
Thanks. Could you please share the policies you mention?