President Calls for New Tools to Combat Bacterial Infections
The development of new tools to combat bacterial infections was named as a top priority by President Obama in an executive order signed Thursday, Sept. 18, designed to address the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. As part of the executive order,
the administration released the “National Strategy on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria,” a five-year plan to prevent and contain outbreaks and develop the next generation of drugs, test and vaccines.
A top focus of the National Strategy is the need to replace antibiotics that have lost their effectiveness through antibiotic resistance with new drugs, including new antibiotics as well as alternatives to antibiotics. The National Strategy calls for intensified efforts to boost basic scientific research, facilitate clinical trials, attract greater private investment and increase the number of drug candidates in the drug-development pipeline to combat resistant bacteria.
The executive order calls for establishing an inter-agency task force charged with developing a national action plan to combat antibiotic resistance to be submitted to the President by Feb. 15, 2015.
The President’s announcement was followed on Friday, Sept. 19, by a hearing on the issue of antibiotic resistance before the Subcommittee on Health of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy & Commerce Committee. The goal of the hearing, entitled “21st Century Cures: Examining Ways to Combat Antibiotic Resistance and Foster New Drug Development” was to examine the growing threat of antibiotic resistance and explore ways to counteract it.
“Once nature adapts, it’s hard to force nature to unadapt,” Rep. Michael C. Burgess, M.D., of Texas, who is vice chairman of the committee, said in his opening remarks. “Resistant strains are out there and are not going away.”
The hearing was part of a broader Energy & Commerce Committee initiative called 21st Century Cures that is focused on improving cures — from the discovery of clues in basic science to streamlining the drug and device development process to unleashing the power of digital medicine and social media in treatment delivery.
The increased national attention that is being focused on the growing problem of antibiotic-resistance by the executive and legislative branches is a very good thing. As the administration’s National Strategy points out, this is an urgent issue:
“As more strains of bacteria become resistant to an ever-larger number of antibiotics, our drug choices have become increasingly limited and more expensive and, in some cases, nonexistent,” the National Strategy concludes. “In a world with few effective antibiotics, modern medical advances such as surgery, transplants and chemotherapy may no longer be viable due to the threat of infection.”
As the government moves forward with initiatives to address the issue of antibiotic resistance, it is important that it focuses on alternatives that can be used in conjunction with or in place of antibiotics. As we have noted before in this column, bacteria are very skilled at eluding the drugs that are developed to combat them. The time to resistance for new antibiotics is now less than a year.
If the national effort to address this problem is to be effective, we need to develop better antibiotics as well as anti-infective therapies that do not promote the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.