AMR Action Fund

“Nothing gold can stay,” as Robert Frost famously noted, and commercial pressures have driven pharmaceutical firms and private investors away from work on new antibiotics, stifling innovation over the last four decades. thebulletin.org/premium/2025… #AMR #AI #Innovation

In writing about the need for pull incentives, AMR Action Fund CEO Henry Skinner explains that "Investors will back risk when there’s a path to value. The U.S., however, seems unable to create such a path." sfchronicle.com/opinion/open… #AMR via @sfc_opinions

“But I would like to sound one note of warning… The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.” With those words, delivered 80 years ago this week in his Nobel Prize lecture, Sir Alexander Fleming issued one of the most prescient public-health warnings of the 20th century. Fleming—along with Sir Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who joined him in receiving the Nobel Prize for the discovery and development of penicillin—understood both the magnitude and the limits of their breakthrough. Penicillin transformed medicine, extended life expectancy, and changed the course of history. Yet even in its earliest days, the first signs of resistance were already emerging, with penicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus emerging as early as 1942, years before the drug was widely available. Eight decades later, Fleming’s warning has proven tragically accurate. Antibiotic resistance now contributes to nearly five million deaths each year. Resistance has been documented to every class of antibiotics we have. And our tendency to take these life-saving drugs for granted persists — in how we use them, how we value them, and how we invest in the future of treating bacterial infections. Recognizing our collective failure to heed his warning is necessary — but recognition alone is not sufficient. The best way to honor Fleming’s pioneering legacy is through a course correction equal to the scale of the challenge: enhancing access to and stewardship of the antibiotics we have, investing in and incentivizing the innovations we need, and ensuring that the miracle of antibiotics remains available for future generations. #AMR