Avid readers of our little blog will recall that our interest in antibiotic research predates it by many years. It was around 2015 that we realised the lack of new antibiotics was becoming an existential threat to us all. Since when we joined with the efforts of leading members of the Community of the Great and the Good to try to actually do something about it.
Well, the news we have this morning is good. GSK, the giant pharmaceuticals corporation, is not only trialling a new antibiotic called gepotidacin, but the trials are going well. This implies a few reasons to be cheerful, to quote Ian Dury, so forgive us if we list them. First it shows that leading commercial organisations are finding ways to finance antibiotic research again. The old “profits are God” model just wasn’t delivering social outcomes. Secondly, new antibiotics will only benefit from the economies of scale, experience in good practice and marketing and communication expertise of something the size of GSK. Thirdly, they’ve targeted a real social need, particularly for women, the debilitating complex of UTIs in general and cystitis in particular. Reasons to be cheerful indeed.
So we’ve got three links for you this morning. For a nice journalistic overview, here’s Ethan Ennals of the Daily Mail[1] For a very simple baseline there’s good old Wikipedia [2] And for lovers of linguistic and intellectual complexity, to say the least, we have a piece of text from GSK themselves. Be warned: it’s definitely not for the faint-hearted. [3]
[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11976115/UK-approves-new-antibiotic-20-years-kills-superbugs-causing-UTIs.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gepotidacin
##antibiotic resistance #superbugs #gepotidacin #uti #medicine #pharmaceuticals #research
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