My wife is a biochemist and entrepreneur. She is co-founder of a small company that has developed techniques for rapid development of new drug candidates to overcome drug resistance. The approach uses technology licensed from a local university. The drug that is furthest along in their pipeline is a cure and preventative for malaria, but they also have candidate anti-bacterial drugs. They have completed preclinical trials for the malaria drug, but to move on to clinical trials, which are very expensive, requires further funding, as does further work on the anti-bacterial drugs. Cuts to the NIH budget has slowed the company's progress and private funding has proven very difficult to obtain.
These two paragraphs from the New Yorker article highlight some of the economic challenges of solving the growing problem of drug resistance (emphasis mine):
Working against pathogenic microbes is not simple altruism. Keeping the lid on bad diseases in the age of air travel is a matter of self-interest, at least as much as it is a duty to our neighbors. And the invisible hand of the market is not currently taking care of this particular business. We are in the midst of a persistent antibiotic-development drought—only two new classes of the drugs have been identified in the last thirty years or so. Drug companies have been withdrawing from antimicrobial research for several reasons. Antibiotics are a lousy business, for one. While blockbuster drugs treat chronic diseases for years at a time, when antibiotics work patients take them for a little while, and then they’re done. For such perfectly rational economic reasons, the pharmaceutical industry is unlikely to keep pace with the need for a social good whose benefits don’t translate into profits that can be readily captured. That makes this a political matter: some other institutions will have to do the work.
But the current state of American politics doesn’t look up to the job either just now. Gamesmanship over the federal budget increases our vulnerability—to TB and to the whole spectrum of resistant disease organisms. In particular, the budget sequester fixed in place by the House G.O.P. caucus increases the risks we face daily. Definitive decisions about the implementation of the sequester are still taking shape, but the Centers for Disease Control alone is losing four hundred and seventy million dollars, and estimates of the damage include the loss of TB services in eleven states. More than four hundred thousand H.I.V. tests won’t get done this year. As many as twelve of the twenty border-quarantine stations the C.D.C. may close, and its Global Disease Detection centers—the front line of U.S. defenses against emerging diseases—are also under threat. In the long term, the sequester threatens to cut out a generation of basic biomedical research. All the while, M. tuberculosis continues to evolve.
Thanks for the post, xchrom. Stay healtthy.
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