The World Health Organization has published a global priority list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to guide research and development of new antibiotics. Every pathogen on this list requires R&D activity, but some are more attractive for private sector investments, as evidenced by the current antibacterial pipeline. A “pipeline coordinator” is a governmental/non-profit organization that closely tracks the antibacterial pipeline and actively supports R&D across all priority pathogens employing new financing tools.

Dans un premier temps, l’auteur accuse le ministère canadien de la Santé de travailler insidieusement au démantèlement de la Direction générale de la protection de la santé pour dorénavant confier la responsabilité de veiller à la sécurité des aliments et des médicaments à l’industrie privée. Face à cette dangereuse déresponsabilisation des pouvoirs publics, l’auteur reproche ensuite aux instances éthiques leur instrumentalisation politique. Par opposition, il importe de mettre en place une éthique de la responsabilité, chien de garde des instances publiques (...) de recherche, d’examen et de contrôle. (shrink)

We design an agent based Monte Carlo model of antibiotics research and development to explore the effects of the policy intervention known as Market Entry Reward on the likelihood that an antibiotic entering pre-clinical development reaches the market. By means of sensitivity analysis we explore the interaction between the MER and four key parameters: projected net revenues, R&D costs, venture capitalists discount rates, and large pharmaceutical organizations' financial thresholds. We show that improving revenues may be more efficient than reducing costs, (...) and thus confirm that this pull-based policy intervention effectively stimulates antibiotics R&D. (shrink)