It’s an Evolutionary Arms Race, and the Superbugs are Winning
It’s time to start doing something about superbugs. A massive new report commissioned by the U.K. government has found that, if left unchecked, by the middle of this century drug-resistant bacteria could kill 10 million people a year—more than currently die of cancer. The costs to the global economy could run to $100 trillion by 2050. It’s one of the greatest threats to global health that we face.
And yet the problem has garnered much less attention than it would seem to warrant. According to economist Jim O’Neill, who led the study at the behest of U.K. prime minister David Cameron, no fundamentally new classes of antibiotic drugs have been developed since the 1950s, and the means of diagnosing bacterial infections remains largely unchanged since the 19th century.
The report’s authors outline a 10-point plan for stopping the coming plague. Many of the measures they outline are straightforward, like improved sanitation, monitoring of how often antibiotics are prescribed, and reducing their use in agriculture (where they are applied prodigiously, both to stop infection and promote growth in livestock).

Such tactics have the potential to make a huge impact. Take poor sanitation as an example: the study estimates that just four countries—India, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil—use 500 million courses of antibiotics each year to combat diarrhea. Cleaning up water supplies could cut that figure by 60 percent. That would be 300 million fewer times bacteria are exposed to our arsenal of germ-killing drugs, and far less opportunity for the bugs to evolve resistance.
Of course, the arsenal could always be expanded, but pharmaceutical companies have to invest heavily in bringing a drug to market. Once they do, they face the challenge of trying to recoup what are often hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D costs and turn a profit—while not making the problem worse by flooding the market with their new compound and giving bugs a chance to develop resistance anew. It should come as little surprise that firms are reluctant to play this game.
Here, too, the report suggests a potentially powerful solution: pay companies big bucks to develop new antibiotics. In their proposal, the authors suggest financial incentives from $800 million to $1.3 billion per drug that would be paid on top of sales revenue for companies to research and produce new weapons in the fight against superbugs.
If that sounds expensive, the report argues, it’s nothing compared to the cost of inaction.
(Read more: The Atlantic, The Economist)
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.