News

AMR Action Fund CEO Henry Skinner, PhD, MBE, discusses the significance of this week, provides an update on the Pasteur Act, and the differing approaches between Europe and the US with regards to push-pull incentives. Clinicians in transplant medicine, burn care, diabetes, labor and delivery, rare diseases, and beyond are grappling with the same reality: to deliver the best possible care, they need effective antibiotics, and AMR is a direct threat to their patients. On the regulatory front, we need regulatory authorities across the globe to align and simplify the approval processes to make access faster and more affordable.Once a drug has been approved by more than one stringent regulatory authority, which is identified by the WHO and includes the US FDA, the UK MHRA, and the European Union authorities, other countries should make approval simple and efficient.Furthermore, post-approval obligations, such as the requirement to study the newly approved drug in pediatric patients should be aligned so that the studies do not need to be repeated in multiple jurisdictions. But nobody is acting fast enough given the state of the pipeline and the fact that antibiotic-resistant infections will contribute to some 5 million deaths this year and next year and climbing every year going forward until we see effective policy reforms.