this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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From what I've heard, part of the problem for antibiotics has been economic. There just isn't a great return on investment for pharmaceutical companies to bring antibiotics to market compared to other drugs. Lowering the cost of discovery could hypothetically help develop new antibiotics and combat drug resistance. Or it could just provide another excuse for the agriculture industry to pump livestock full of antibiotics, thereby wasting any progress.
It's not economy, it's politics. Who gives a fuck if it's profitable for them? They are supposedly here to make medicine, save people. So the solution is not in tech at all, or to be fair it's in old tech like guillotines
They're all capitalists. They're here to make money. They just decided that making high cost profitable medicine is how they will do it. Saving people is a small side benefit that comes with people buying the medicine, not the main goal.
They do make medicine that benefit people, but they're going to optimize around profit. The biggest sellers are drugs for very common cancers and for conditions that require lifelong treatment like rheumatoid arthritis. Estimates vary widely, but it costs somewhere in the ballpark of $1 billion to bring a new drug to market.
It just doesn't make sense for a drug company to produce new antibiotics when the point is to stockpile backup antibiotics to use against antibiotic resistance. The point, after all, is to not sell the product so that it is most potent when it is needed. This is one of the areas where I think it's best for governments to chip in.