It sounds like a plot lifted from a science fiction film, but the latest health scare hitting the headlines is all too real. Germs are developing a resistance to antibiotics, which could soon render medical science powerless to stop people dying from everyday occurrences, such as a cut finger or grazed knee.

Bacteria could kill 10 million people a year by 2050, up from 700,000 today, according to the findings of a review on the growing resistance to antibiotics by economist Jim O’Neill (19 May).

A week after that report was published, a woman in the US was diagnosed with an infection that is resistant to Colistin, the antibiotic of last resort used to tackle the most dangerous superbugs.

The next generation

One of the issues is that the last new antibiotic was discovered in the 1980s. Believing that the issue had been solved pharmaceuticals moved onto tackling other conditions such as cancer or asthma.

To help solve this growing threat O’Neill repeated calls to establish a fund for research into developing new antibiotics.

The good news is that companies have been working to put new antibiotics on hospital shelves. Drug giants GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and AstraZeneca (AZN) have research programmes, but smaller companies are seeking to tackle the problem too.

New York-based, but London-listed Motif Bio (MTFB:AIM) has a treatment in the final stage of clinical trials, while Summit Therapeutics (SUMM:AIM) is also gathering proof that its treatment works.

If there are no hiccups, Motif’s chief executive Graham Lumsden expects to have clinical trial data to hand to regulators in the US and Europe in the second half of 2017, with decisions on if the antibiotic can be sold in these regions due the following year.

Summit’s most advanced treatment is Ridinilazole (SMT19969), an antibiotic for treating clostridium difficile infection, a condition affecting the intestines. This has finished phase two clinical trials and chief executive Glyn Edwards expects it to be on the market sometime around 2020.

Lumsden explains that antibiotic resistance is a big issue because you cannot give someone a knee replacement without antibiotic coverage and it’s the same problem for cancer patients on chemotherapy. Edwards points to up to a third of Gonorrhoea cases in the US and Europe are now treated with combinations of drugs over a longer period of time. ‘Antibiotic resistance is a horrible problem for the long-term and in one or two cases it is a problem right now,’ Edwards says.

Fighting back

One method of stopping germs from developing mutations and thus a resistance to antibiotics is for GPs to prescribe them less. Inappropriate and overuse is feeding growing resistance and so doctors are only prescribing for bacterial infections and no longer for chest infections.

The new approach is not an issue for Motif because it is developing an antibiotic that will only be used in hospitals. It’s the same story for Summit, with the clostridium difficile infection spread in hospitals.

‘The big problem with antibiotics is not on the GP side, it is in hospitals,’ Lumsden says. ‘The bugs contracted in hospitals are resistant to too many antibiotics and we are running out of options. We urgently need new antibiotics coming to market for hospital-based infections.’