“The scientific community has developed and approved new antibiotics in recent years. This is good, but unfortunately not sufficient to catch up with evolving drug-resistance bacteria, especially against those of greatest concern. We need a reliable pipeline with new antibacterial agents that are innovative, affordable, accessible to all those who need them.”
Dr Yvan Hutin, Director of Antimicrobial Resistance at WHO
Says it all really, everything that we’ve been banging on about here for the last six years and more. The problem is simple, but deadly. Although more than 90 new antibiotics are now in development, very of few of them target the really high-priority organisms that worry health care professionals: and even fewer of these are really innovative (in the way that penicillin was in its day for example) And so the World Health Organization, that most noble of entities has come up with a Cunning Plan to really get things moving. They gave divided it into three Target Product Profiles:
-our old friends the multidrug resistant gram negative bacteria such as enterobacteriales, Acinobacter baumanii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, who’ve shown up in so many old LSS blogs we won’t bother to list them.
–Gram positives like Enterococcus faecium. We have wondered why the gram negatives have been getting all the attention, and seeing no Darwinian reason why the gram positives should not evolve resistance too, are extremely glad someone is at last paying attention to them.
-their third trope for action is bacterial meningitis, caused by organisms such as Neisseria meningitidis and Streptococcus pneumoniae among others. Particularly welcome, for of those who incur such dreadful infections, one out of six will die and of the survivors, about one in five will be left with some long term disimpairment.
Hats off to Dr Hutin in particular and the World Health Organization in general. The World Health Organization is often treated as a mere federation of its member states, but in practice it is something larger and more coherent than the sum of its parts. Individual nations see only their own budgets, their own pathogens, their own political cycles; the WHO sees the whole epidemiological chessboard. Its strength lies in that cooperative vantage point — the ability to gather data from Lagos and Lima, to convene experts from Seoul and Stockholm, and to turn a hundred local anxieties into a single, rational blueprint for global action. In a field as fragmented and under‑powered as antibiotic development, that kind of coordination isn’t bureaucracy; it’s civilisation defending itself. There’s your glass-raiser for Friday Night Cocktails, gentle readers.
WHO releases new target product profiles for urgently needed antibiotics
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