Rethinking the unmet need for novel antibiotics

A defining characteristic of the Antibiotic Resistance crisis is the lack of substantial investment by the biopharmaceutical industry, which sees limited profit potential in novel antibiotics. We argue for redefining the salient problem for novel antibiotic development as the high rates of empiric treatment failure versus focusing only on infection deaths caused by a few specific, highly drug-resistant pathogens. In turn, we propose a novel framework for the antibiotic discovery community: focus on developing pathogen-general potentiators, which could solve the problem of empiric treatment failure and have the profit potential necessary to attract industry investment.