COLLABORATION FOR INNOVATION

17 October 2011

Collaboration for Innovation - The Urgent Need for New Antibiotics.

Very few novel antibiotics are coming onto the market, even though the need is ever increasing because of antibiotic resistance. In the European Union alone, multi drug-resistant bacteria cause at least 25,000 deaths annually. Moreover, costs for healthcare and productivity losses already add up to at least €1,5 billion per year. On May 23rd , ReAct – Action on Antibiotic Resistance organized a policy seminar in Brussels specifically focusing on the urgent need to develop new antibiotics. (The seminar gathered close to 50 key actors from the EU commission, member states, EU and government agencies, WHO, academia, the pharmaceutical industry, civil society and others. A report, with highlights and conclusions from the meeting, has now been released.

The seminar aimed to contribute directly to the EU strategy against antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and its potential impacts which is currently under development and planned to be published in November 2011, as well as to the EU Commission’s comprehensive action plan including concrete proposals concerning incentives to develop new effective antibiotics, to be presented in 2012.

Rather than only focusing on incentives to stimulate the private sector, the seminar aimed to broaden the framework and also explore a number of fundamental questions: How difficult is it to discover new antibiotics? What are the scientific bottlenecks? What forms of collaboration are essential to make breakthroughs?

In addition to an agreement on the need for a radically new business model that delinks revenues from sales, there was broad agreement that the challenges around innovation require new forms of collaboration and sharing of knowledge.

Download the seminar report (pdf 4 MB)

Meeting agenda and presentations from the meeting

Watch video presentations from the meeting

Background documents prepared for the seminar:

Lynn Silver, LL Silver Consulting "Scientific obstacles to discovery of novel antibacterials" (pdf 148 KB)

Chantal Morel, LSE "Exploring responses to the need for new antibiotics: How do different incentives compare?" (pdf 333 KB)

Bernard Munos, InnoThink Center "Using open innovation to tackle the dearth of antibiotics" (pdf 314 KB)

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