Medical need

D. Monnet: Antibiotic development and the changing role of the pharmaceutical industry

Although possibly needed, financial incentives should not be applied indiscriminately to any antibiotic coming out of R&D and should probably only be applied to truly novel compounds with a new mechanism of action. Companies should also be encouraged make the decision to limit indications of a new antibiotic to the most severely ill patients or to treat infections
due to multidrug-resistant microorganisms. Through trust and commitment, a balance could be achieved between protection of innovation and access to antibacterial drugs.

GH Talbot et al: Bad Bugs Need Drugs: An Update on the Development Pipeline from the Antimicrobial Availability Task Force of the Infectious Diseases Society of America
CID 2006 (42) 657

To emphasize further the urgency of the problem for the benefit of legislators and policy makers and to capture the ongoing frustration our clinician colleagues experience in their frequent return to an inadequate medicine cabinet, the AATF has prepared this review to highlight pathogens that are frequently resistant to licensed antimicrobials and for which few, if any, potentially effective drugs are identifiable in the late-stage development pipeline.

G. Cornaglia et al.: European recommendations for antimicrobial resistance surveillance.
CMI 2004 (10) 349

Reporting of antimicrobial resistance data is necessary for selection of empirical therapy at the local level, for assessing the scale of the resistance problem at the local, national or international levels, for monitoring changes in resistance rates, and for detecting the emergence and spread of new resistances types. Any type of surveillance study should conclude, where appropriate, with a proposal for intervention based on the data obtained.