A Personnel Problem: We Need More Antimicrobial Researchers, Infectious Disease Clinicians
A decreasing number of researchers and open positions for infectious disease clinicians and limited residency matches are underlying issues that should be addressed to meet the needs around antimicrobial development and clinical care. Amesh Adalja, MD, FIDSA, discusses some of the challenges behind it.
The number of researchers working on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has significantly declined over the past 20 years, according to the AMR Industry Alliance. By one metric, the total number of authors on all AMR publications has declined from a high of 3,599 in 1995 to 1,827 in 2020, alongside an overall decline in publications.1
It’s estimated there are approximately 3,000 AMR researchers in the world who are currently active, compared to as many as 46,000 for cancer. This equates to the former group being 15 times smaller than the latter group.1
“Antibiotic drug development isn’t a very lucrative field for pharmaceutical companies, and they’re the kind of pull incentive that’s gets researchers into the field, because there’s a promise of a drug down the line that is going to create a return on investment and improve outcomes for patients,” said Amesh Adalja, MD, FIDSA, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, practicing infectious disease physician, and spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). “When you think about antibiotics, they’re a very small market in terms of pharmaceuticals. And the market that antibiotics play in is very different than any other type of drug.”
In order to try and make inroads to try to get pharmaceutical companies interested in developing antimicrobials, Adalja says one strategy is to develop a pull incentive like the “Netflix pay model,” which was previously introduced in Congress as the Pasteur Act, but remains in a holding pattern.
Read the full article on Contagion Live.