Pipeline of new drugs to fight superbugs is ‘worryingly thin’, experts warn | Pharmaceuticals industry
The pipeline of new drugs to combat superbugs remains “worrying” and has declined by 35% over the past five years, experts have said, predicting that the annual number of deaths linked to drug-resistant infections worldwide will double to 8 million by 2050.
The number of projects from big pharmaceutical companies has fallen 35% over the past five years, from 92 to 60 drugs in development, according to a report from the Access to Medicine Foundation (AMF), a Netherlands-based nonprofit group supported by the Wellcome Trust.
“Overall, however, the R&D pipeline remains worrisome and industrial investments have lost momentum,” said Jayasree K Iyer, director general of the AMF. She described drug resistance as the greatest threat to health care worldwide.
More than a million people die directly from drug-resistant infections each year, but they contribute to 4 million deaths each year worldwide. Both figures are expected to double by 2050 – to almost 2 million and more than 8 million, respectively.
Ara Darzi, a cancer surgeon who led a survey of the NHS in 2024 and is executive chair of the Fleming Initiative to tackle antimicrobial resistance, said pharmaceutical companies had a “moral responsibility to underwrite the risk”, noting that infection was the second leading cause of death among cancer patients.
New therapies make it possible to fight cancer, “but unfortunately, patients succumb to an infection that was treatable ten years ago,” he said at the launch of the AMF report.
“You don’t win a game if you have three good attackers and your defense is weak.”
British company GSK is leading the way in antimicrobial resistance research and development (R&D) with 30 projects and is one of three major pharmaceutical companies continuing to invest in this area, according to the report.
The other two big players are the Japanese Shionogi and Otsuka, while the American drugmaker Pfizer, which had been an initial partnership with GSK in 2021, has backed down.
Britain’s largest pharmaceutical company, AstraZeneca, is not included in the ranking because it does not have an antibiotics portfolio, with infectious diseases never having been a focus. The report evaluates the efforts of 25 companies, including seven large research companies, ten generic drug makers and eight small drug developers or biotechnology companies.
Iyer said three recently approved antibiotics and seven other promising drugs in late-stage development have shown “it is possible to tilt the battle against superbugs in humanity’s favor.”
In December, the US health regulator approved California biotech Innoviva’s zoliflodacin (branded as Nuzolvence) to treat gonorrhea, as well as GSK’s gepotidacin (sold as Blujepa) for uncomplicated urinary tract infections and urogenital gonorrhea. These are the first antibiotics developed to treat these diseases in decades.
People in low- and middle-income countries, where infectious diseases hit hardest, are most vulnerable to drug-resistant superbugs. “There is no time to lose,” said the AMF.
Hospitals around the world have seen an alarming increase in common antibiotic-resistant infections. One in six laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections were resistant to antibiotic treatments in 2023, with more than 40% of antibiotics losing their effectiveness against blood, gut, urinary tract and sexually transmitted infections between 2018 and 2023, according to the World Health Organization.
