.png)
Key Messages:
Antimicrobial resistance is an increasing global threat and the world needs a reliable pipeline of new, effective antimicrobials as a crucial element of managing it.
The antimicrobial market is characterised by a pervasive market failure where developers are unable to realise a sufficient return on investment once a new drug is approved, despite the high-societal value of new antimicrobials coming to market.
Pull incentives policies, which offer alternative and/or additional methods of rewarding innovators for bringing high-value antimicrobials to market offer a well evidenced and widely supported mechanism to strengthen the antimicrobial pipeline through sufficiently awarding developers of new therapies.
Building on previous analyses at the EU and G7 levels, we examined the expected return on investment for national governments investing in a new incentive scheme targeting the development of 18 new drugs over a 30-year time horizon.
Our analysis show that for all countries considered, purchasing antimicrobials through a de-linked incentive program gives a robustly positive return on investment over both short- and long-term horizons, ranging from 1.3:1 to 4.6:1 over a 10-year horizon and from 6.1:1 to 21:1 over a 30-year horizon. This estimate conservatively only includes direct clinical benefits to patients and reduced healthcare costs, and should hence be considered as a lower bound.
Based on this research, we created a dashboard which allows for the return on investment of a pull incentive scheme to be calculated under a wide range of assumptions.
