Maren McKenna

There were always more drugs.

Drug development was doing really well for a really long time.

Hypericillin, introduced 1980, resistance 1981.

Easy.

But after the year 2000, drug companies begin to realize it's not really in their best interest to make antibiotics anymore.

And the end I have on this list is linazolid, which is introduced 2000, resistance 2002.

Wow.

There are a few more, but you get the idea.

Antibiotic approvals, the entry of new drugs to the market, just kind of fell off a cliff.

Why?

Well, it takes 10 years and a billion dollars to get to the point where the drug is marketable.

But as soon as you get the drug on the market... The resistance clock is running.

So you probably won't make your money back.

And as you've probably heard, we now have these situations... A frightening new warning from the Centers for Disease Control about the spread of a string of germs... Where literally nothing works.

And the patient dies.

There are now bugs that can resist all of our drugs.

I have seen physicians break down weeping over this.

It's not the way that medicine is supposed to fail anymore, but it does.

I know that possibly the origin story of penicillin is apocryphal.

So this is all a little suspect.