Taxpayers Should Fund New Antibiotics - Report

Big pharmaceutical companies should be given incentives of up to £24bn to develop a new generation of antibiotics, according a report commissioned by the Government.

Taxpayers around the world could be asked to stump up much of the money over the next 10 years, the report by a leading economist suggests.

But the price would be less than a fifth of the cost of dealing with antibiotic resistance in the US alone.

Jim O'Neill, former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said the money should be used to reward companies for investing in research and development.

Currently, companies make meagre returns on antibiotic development and have to sell them in large quantities, contributing to the spread of resistance.

Mr O'Neill told Sky News: "Compared to what has been going on for the last 20 years or so – 15 new, really effective antibiotics would be a huge positive development.

"It would not solve the problem on its own – there is a big issue with our demand for these things – but it would solve this core fear that over next 20 to 30 years we are going to run out of antibiotics."

No new classes of antibiotics have been created for several decades, and the development "pipeline" of new drugs is largely empty. Many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned antibiotics because the returns are so low.

Patrick Vallance, GlaxoSmithKline (Other OTC: GLAXF - news) 's President of Pharmaceuticals Research & Development, said: "We are very encouraged by the ideas it sets out to modernise the economic model to encourage investment in research, and ensure reasonable returns for successful innovation, while discouraging unnecessary use of new antibiotics."

Medical organisations have voiced growing alarm at the prospect of routine surgery becoming life-threatening in a world without antibiotics.

An extra 10 million lives could be lost to infections each year unless new drugs can be found.

Dame Sally Davies, the UK's Chief Medical Officer, added: "We have to respond to the challenge of antimicrobial resistance by making sure we secure the necessary antibiotics for generations to come, in order to save millions of lives and billions of pounds."