“Ultimately, if you don’t have profits — if you don’t recoup your innovation investments — that innovation will come to a halt. And that is what we see in our family,” van Leeuwen said.
On top of that, spending on antibiotics decreased between 2011 and 2020 in developed countries — as their use becomes more sparing — making it an even less attractive field.
“Investors will always have the choice between antimicrobial resistance and oncology,” said Frédéric Peyrane, BEAM Alliance’s managing director and founder of Mandanova, a company that helps innovators access funding. “It will always be more attractive to go to oncology.”
But as the world needs new antimicrobials, there needs to be a greater financial motivation to attract investors, he said. R&D incentives, classified into push and pull, are aimed at reinvigorating antibiotic pipelines. And while there are plenty of push incentives — to help fund early R&D — there is a dire lack of pull incentives, to solve the market failure.
“Imagine you are in a hole,” Peyrane said. Someone can push you half-way up, but without a rope to pull you from the top, “you will not get out.”
This is where many biotechs, including Villain-Guillot’s, got stuck — half-way up the drug development journey before they were forced to quit. “If we had the possibility to obtain pull incentive within Europe it would have been helpful for companies like us,” he said.