The looming superbug crisis: Politics, profit, and Big Pharma | Matt McCarthy | Big Think

The looming superbug crisis: Politics, profit, and Big Pharma

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Alexander Fleming discovered a fungus that produced a chemical that could stop nearly every bacteria in its path. The 1950s are known as the Golden Era of Antibiotic Development.

However, today, there is a looming superbug crisis because bacteria has mutated whilst we've focused on treating other diseases, such as cancer and heart disease. Many companies in the pharmaceutical industry don't want to take on the expensive risk of finding another antibiotic drug.

However, a potential superbug crisis may compel us to use tax-break and patent policies to incentivize them to do so.

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MATT MCCARTHY

Matt McCarthy, MD, graduated from Harvard Medical School and went on to complete his internal medicine residency at Columbia University Medical Center. He is the author of two national bestsellers, "The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly" and "Odd Man Out." His newest book, "Superbugs," is on-sale now.

He is also an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell and a staff physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MATT MCCARTHY: Yeah, the discovery of antibiotics is one of the most remarkable stories in medicine. There was this young military physician named Alexander Fleming who was taking care of injured soldiers in 1914 at a makeshift military hospital in France. And he noticed that many of the soldiers had infections that were not getting better with the tools that he had to treat them, which was largely his surgical scalpel and also antiseptic fluid. And he was just 34 years old at the time, but Fleming recognized that there had to be a better way. And after the war was over, he went back to his laboratory at St. Mary's Hospital and started tinkering around. And it wasn't until nearly 15 years later that he stumbled upon this fungus that was producing a chemical that was so extraordinary that it could kill almost every bacteria in its path. And the chemical that that fungus was producing is what we now know is penicillin.

What's interesting about that story is that the discovery did not lead to a commercially available drug right away. In fact, Alexander Fleming didn't realize that he was on the cusp of some incredible discovery. It took another World War, and teaming up with the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry and a number of other researchers at Oxford University, before everyone fully recognized what he had stumbled upon in his laboratory in the late 1920s. And that discovery of penicillin ushered in what we now know of as the golden era of antibiotic development. The 1950s was a period when there was a new drug being discovered seemingly every few months. And the life expectancy of humans shot up because of all of these fantastic discoveries. But then there was a problem, which is that we were so successful finding new antibiotics, that a number of prominent physicians and scientists came out and said, we got this infectious disease issue kicked. It's time to look for more pressing issues like heart disease and cancer.

And so we started focusing our attention on treating those diseases just as the bacteria were being exposed to our precious arsenal of antibiotics. And that set up a very difficult situation, which is that the bacteria were mutating when we took our eye off the ball. And we didn't recognize the scope of the problem until the 1990s. And that's when we first recognized that there were all of these drug resistant bacteria around us, which we now think of as superbugs. Yeah, so when we talk about bacteria evolving into superbugs, what we mean is that they are mutating to develop machinery and enzymes that can evade even our most powerful antibiotics. My favorite one is something called an efflux pump. And it's a microscopic vacuum cleaner that bacteria have developed that can suck up an antibiotic and spit it out. One of the other things I really like are these enzymes that they have created that chew up antibiotics. And they scavenge for metals, like zinc. And they can chop up even the most complex or nuanced medication that we throw at them.

And so bacteria are constantly doing this whether we recognize it or not. And so what's been fascinating to see is how quickly they can evolve. This is a remarkable insight that we can now discover this. But it also sets up a very perilous situation for the companies that want to create new antibiotics. They know that, if they make a new drug, the bacter...

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