The European Commission has authorised the usage of a new antibiotic to try and combat superbugs.
The drug, Emblaveo, was created by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Abbvie, alongside the European Union and the United States. Approved on the 22nd April, scientists hope the decades-long battle against superbugs and their antibiotic resistance is getting closer to the end.
According to the European Commission, the new medicine can be used to: “treat complicated intra-abdominal and urinary tract infections, hospital-acquired pneumonia and infections caused by certain types of drug-resistant bacteria [Gram-negative bacteria].”
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The governing body continued: “It will therefore contribute to tackling the serious problem of antimicrobial resistance and provide patients with treatment options where currently there are few or none.”
José Miguel Cisneros, is head of the Infectious Diseases Department at the Hospital Virgen del Rocío in Spain, and also one of the academic leaders of Emblaveo’s clinical trials.
Cisneros explained: “It was a long-awaited antibiotic because it is active against strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae or Escherichia coli, among other enterobacteria, which have developed multi-resistance to antibiotics and have become some of the most difficult microorganisms to treat.”
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He added: “The REVISIT trial has demonstrated that aztreonam-avibactam is effective and safe in the treatment of hospitalized adult patients with severe acute infections and stands out from other available antimicrobials because of its potent in-vitro activity against Gram-negative bacteria that produce metallobetalactamase [enzymes].”
Emblaveo was created by combining molecules of pre-existing drugs Aztreonam and Avibactam. In the past, similar combinationss have been employed in the past, in an attempt to combat antibiotic-resistant infections.
However, according to scientific journalists, superbugs pose less of a threat to antibiotics than scientific disinterest. According to a 2020 article titled ‘ Why Big Pharma Has Abandoned Antibiotics ‘, pharmaceutical companies are now much less likely to invest in creating new drugs, due to them not making much capital.
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The solution? Going public, according to Jaime Espín, professor at the Andalusian School of Public Health and former advisor to the European Commission. Espín explained: “To reverse this situation, the development of new antibiotics has been a priority for support and public financing by administrations in the European Union and the United States.”:
Emblaveo appears to be another example in the growing sea of collaborations between public bodies and big pharmaceutical companies.
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