Dr Seamus O’Brien
Director of R&D, the Global Antibiotic Research & Development Partnership (GARDP)
Having remained relatively steady for the last three decades, the number of drug-resistant infections is now expected to rise sharply as treatment options decline.
Drug-resistant infections are already one of the world’s biggest killers, but the latest research into global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) trends suggests that we may now need to brace ourselves. By 2050, the number of deaths associated with AMR could increase by 70%, with a staggering 169 million people dying during this period.1
Balancing antibiotic access and use
Fortunately, we can prevent this from happening, provided we change both the way we develop and use antibiotics. The excessive use of antibiotics, or using them inappropriately, is one of the main drivers of drug resistance. Yet, what is less widely understood is that most people in the world don’t have access to the antibiotics they need, with more people dying from a lack of access to antibiotics than from drug-resistant infections.
While it is essential to encourage the appropriate use of antibiotics and limit their use to when necessary, it is also critical to ensure doctors and patients get access to the right antibiotics in the first place. Additionally, providing data to guide optimal treatment for drug-resistant infections is crucial. This could prevent millions of deaths in the coming years.
It is also critical to ensure doctors
and patients get access to the right
antibiotics in the first place.
Innovative antibiotic combinations and new classes
We must also develop new antibiotic treatments, to replace those that have been lost to drug resistance. This is often taken to mean that entirely new classes of antibiotics need to be found, which takes both considerable time and investment. However, while we certainly do need new classes, they cannot be our only option.
We also need to look at existing antibiotics and evaluate how we can better use them, including combinations to improve and prolong effectiveness and potentially delay the onset of resistance. Such innovative combinations of existing antibiotics, and the use of compounds to counteract resistance mechanisms, can act as a stopgap. We still need new classes of antibiotics, but such approaches can save time and lives.
[1] Naghavi, M., et al. (2023). Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance 1990–2021: A systematic analysis with forecasts to 2050. The Lancet, 404(10459), 1199-1226.
