5 challenges that governments need to address in resolving the stagnation in antibiotic development

We are now well into a third decade of failure and standstill in developing new antibiotics. Meanwhile resistance to all of our existing antibiotics continues to develop across the world and antibiotic resistance was the cause of 1.2 million deaths in 2019, more than for HIV/AIDS and malaria. The traditional market-based financing model for research and development of new antibiotics continues to fail. The reason for the lack of innovation is often presented as a matter of insufficient profitability for the pharmaceutical industry. However, there are significant scientific challenges that remain unresolved, which contributed to large pharmaceutical companies abandoning the field over the past decades.