Antibiotics crisis: the beginning of the end?

Life Sciences Report 2015 reveals the patent landscape behind big pharma’s ‘decade of intense research into treatments for orphan diseases’.

The looming public health crisis is well documented, but the truth about R&D spend on rare diseases over antibiotics was laid bare in a recent report by Marks & Clerk. Life Sciences Report 2015 reveals the patent landscape behind big pharma’s ‘decade of intense research into treatments for orphan diseases’.

While these treatments are beneficial to a small proportion of the population, “the approaching crisis in antibiotics resistance has the potential to be catastrophic for human healthcare”, says Marks & Clark partner Gareth Williams. By contrast, antibiotics suffer from an “extremely low” level of research and new antibiotics are even more affected.

Thanks to increasing pressure and governmental incentives this trend is changing – but slowly. Vaccines, whose relative cost occupies the middle ground between rare diseases and antibiotics, has also seen an uptick in patent filings. But how many people will be affected by this disproportionate allocation of resources over the next decade? Article sourced from Intellectual Property Magazine. Click here to read more…