Superbug Threat Sparks U.K. to Test New Antibiotic Pay System

(Bloomberg) -- Drug-resistant infections that are spreading around the world have pushed U.K. health officials to test a payment system designed to encourage drugmakers to rekindle programs to develop new antibiotics.

The subscription-style approach will pay companies upfront for access to the anti-infectives, rather than by the number of doses used, the Department of Health and Social Care said Tuesday. The plan is aimed at giving companies with innovative drugs, which are often saved for only the most dire cases, compensation for their development efforts.

“Tackling superbugs needs global leadership, and peoples’ lives depend on us finding a new way forward,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in a statement. The U.K.’s National Health Service, which pays for most medications used in the country, “is in a unique position to take a global lead in testing new payment models.”

Concerns about dwindling ranks of new antibiotics are rising as more strains of bacteria find ways of evading standard drugs, and many big pharma companies pull back from the field due to dwindling returns. The rise of hard-to-treat germs has revived concern about a world in which even the most routine infections could be lethal as bugs develop resistance to existing drugs.

To contact the reporter on this story: John Lauerman in London at jlauerman@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Eric Pfanner at epfanner1@bloomberg.net

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