Grant: JPIAMR Final Conference Travel Awards

High prices create incentives for industry to develop new antibiotics, but also incentivize firms to promote their products to maximize sales volumes. Similarly, the Market Entry Rewards proposed by the O’Neill Commission and others will help to get new drugs to market but don’t directly address resistance (O’Neill 2016). The multidisciplinary study proposed here explores the feasibility of a finance-based intervention intended to directly re-align pharmaceutical industry interests with the minimization of antibiotic resistance and with the overall prolongation of antibiotic efficacy through time. It thus addresses JPIAMR Call topics 1 and 3. The intervention allows pharmaceutical companies to qualify for staged bonuses if pathogen susceptibility to their antibiotic remains above a given threshold. This Antibiotic Susceptibility Bonus helps maximize efforts towards good prescribing practice and towards minimizing the risk of acquisition, development and transmission of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The lure of a bonus greater than expected revenues from unit sales could help align efforts behind infection prevention efforts in hospitals, communities, agriculture, and the environment, bolstering public and private AMR initiatives across One Health sectors. In sum, the project proposed will evaluate feasibility of the Antibiotic Susceptibility Bonus. If it is deemed feasible, the work will establish the susceptibility sampling and aggregation framework, calculate optimal bonus magnitudes based on market considerations, and apply the analysis to two relevant antibiotic cases.