Comparison of Pharma efforts to address drug-resistant infections

The first independent analysis of pharmaceutical industry efforts to tackle drug resistance, finds that as well as developing new drugs companies are also dismantling the incentives that encourage sales staff to oversell antibiotics, setting limits on the concentration of antibiotics in factory wastewater released into the environment, and tracking the spread of superbugs.

In the Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark, GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK) and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) lead among the large research-based pharmaceutical companies, while Mylan (Nasdaq: MYL) leads the generic medicine manufacturers and Entasis Therapeutics leads in the biotechnology group. The Benchmark finds room for all companies to improve, as well as evidence of good practice.

"If we don't use antibiotics in the right doses or for the right bugs, we risk giving bacteria a chance to adapt and strengthen their defences, which will make it harder to kill them the next time. The threat that once-deadly infections could again become life-threatening is intensifying," said Jayasree Iyer, executive director of the Access to Medicine Foundation, which publishes the Benchmark. "Pharmaceutical companies have a critical contribution to make to the effort to tackle superbugs."