The Food and Drug Administration on August 14, 2019 approved a new Tuberculosis treatment drug that had been proven effective in fighting against drug-resistant [TB] bacteria which were becoming more lethal as traditional drugs began to show increasing impotence to fight against ever-morphing TB infection. TB kills 1.6 million people a year, including over 500,000 people who are usually affected by the drug-resistant strains.
The innovative part of this antibiotic finding was that it was done by a nonprofit group, called the TB Alliance, as more and more pharma companies had been shedding the antibiotic production business and began to focus on more lucrative specialty drugs and medicines to treat chronic diseases such as Blood Pressure and Cholesterol. Antibiotic segment doesn't generate expected ROI for most of the pharmaceutical companies as they take long time going through Research and Development and subsequent scalable production cycle, costing upward of $1 billion, and eventually are used to treat infections that will go away within weeks. Therefore, it makes sense if future research of antibiotics is taken over by non-profits and if their inventions turn out to be effective, scaling up the production process may be handled jointly or handed over to a pharma company.
The innovative part of this antibiotic finding was that it was done by a nonprofit group, called the TB Alliance, as more and more pharma companies had been shedding the antibiotic production business and began to focus on more lucrative specialty drugs and medicines to treat chronic diseases such as Blood Pressure and Cholesterol. Antibiotic segment doesn't generate expected ROI for most of the pharmaceutical companies as they take long time going through Research and Development and subsequent scalable production cycle, costing upward of $1 billion, and eventually are used to treat infections that will go away within weeks. Therefore, it makes sense if future research of antibiotics is taken over by non-profits and if their inventions turn out to be effective, scaling up the production process may be handled jointly or handed over to a pharma company.
