NW pharma leaders respond to Select Committee report on antibiotic crisis

Dr Peter Jackson

North West businesses, industry groups and public health leaders have welcomed a new report today (October 22) from the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee, which calls on the Government to make the crisis around our diminishing supply of effective antibiotics a ‘top five policy priority’ in order to help prevent the virtual loss of worldwide modern medicine.

The Select Committee, chaired by Dr Sarah Wollaston and featuring Liverpool Wavertree MP Luciana Berger, makes a series of recommendations around investment in new drug development, prescribing habits and better use of digital health tools.

Given the UK’s pending exit from the European Union, it also wants any future trade deals to require that meat and dairy produce imported into the UK meet at least the same standards relating to antibiotic use which apply to products produced in the EU.

At present antimicrobial resistance (AMR) claims around 700,000 lives a year around the world, but that figure is forecast to multiply.

By 2050, if left unchecked, drug-resistant infections will kill 10 million people a year and make even routine surgical procedures much more risky.

AMR occurs because bacteria naturally develop the ability to defeat the antibiotics designed to kill them.

There has not been a new class of antibiotics created for more than 30 years and the failure of drug development to keep pace, along with overuse of existing antibiotics in human and animal health, has given rise to superbugs that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to treat.

The AMR Centre, based at Alderley Park in Cheshire, is part of the UK response to the crisis and joined forces with North of England life science industry group Bionow to coordinate a wide-ranging submission to the Select Committee.

It consulted with many key business and organisations across the UK, including the Evotec (UK), Redx Pharma Plc, Blueberry Therapeutics and the Medicines Discovery Catapult, all based at Alderley Park, along with the Northern Health Sciences Alliance, Liverpool University, and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine Centre of Excellence in Infectious Diseases Research.

Dr Peter Jackson, executive director of The AMR Centre, said: “We welcome the Select Committee recommendations today, which reflect many of the concerns featured in our industry group submission.

“The Government’s updated AMR strategy is due to be published early in 2019, and this is a key opportunity to renew the impetus for tackling this extremely serious threat.

“The Government’s five-year AMR strategy (2013-2018) called for a new supply of safe and effective antimicrobial drugs, but the UK’s current translational capability is under-invested, and not yet adequately powered to provide a sustainable pipeline of life-saving medicines to treat AMR.

“Our submission called for an urgent and coordinated plan of action across pharma companies, SMEs, government, investors, philanthropy and academia to significantly increase investment in the translation of new AMR programmes, in particular to target the World Health Organisation’s critical priority superbugs.

“Few of the drugs currently in clinical development around the world tackle these particular pathogens,” Dr Jackson pointed out.

“Much of the current pipeline is composed of analogues of existing drugs: new classes of drug and new therapeutic targets are required.

“The fact is, no new classes of antibiotics have been discovered for decades, which is the result of market failure.

“Pharmaceutical companies are concerned about the profitability of new antimicrobial drugs, and investment in their development has, therefore, been limited.

“Because of the need to protect new antibiotics from overuse in order to reduce the emergence of resistance, new approaches are required to encourage R&D in the public interest.

“That’s where the Government can step in and provide leadership and funding to catalyse further private sector investment – and that’s what the Select Committee is calling for.”

The Selected Committee noted that two of the Government’s key advisers on AMR have independently called for “more visible and active Government leadership” on this issue.

It said the evidence it has received suggested that, despite the severity of the threat posed by AMR and its potential to affect every area of healthcare, AMR is now struggling for priority and needs political leadership at the highest level of Government.

The report comments: “The fact that no inter-ministerial meetings have been held to discuss AMR in the past 15 months speaks not only of a lack of priority, but also of a lack of join-up across Government to tackle this.

“Given the severity of the threat, AMR needs to be firmly established as a top five policy priority for the Government as a whole, drawing together the work of Department of Health and Social Care; the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs; the Department for International Development; the Foreign Office and Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.”

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