WS 20 - Antibiotic Research & Development

Modern medicine is not conceivable without effective antibiotic treatment. Curing infectious diseases would hardly be possible without antimicrobial agents. However, overuse and misuse of antibiotics in hospitals and agriculture have substantially increased the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Alarmingly, the dramatic worldwide rise of multi- and pan-resistant pathogenic strains cannot be contained by the low success rates of current drug development. In fact, only a small fraction of the antibiotics approved over the last 40 years represent novel compound classes. If there is no significant future progress, the World Health Organization considers a “post antibiotic era” a realistic future scenario in which, for example, pneumonia and wound infections once again could become acute life-threatening diseases.

This workshop addresses key problems in modern antibiotic research and development from both academic and industrial perspectives and shall raise public awareness that novel antibiotics are indispensable to sustain our future quality of life. At the same time, pointing out the challenges and unavoidable costs of antibiotic drug development may help to change the political attitude towards stronger investments into sustainable scientific programs for drug development, ideally in partnership with global health organizations and industry. Innovative approaches to strengthen the discovery of novel antibiotics and to bridge the translational gap towards the clinical optimization of new therapeutics will be presented.