Antibiotic Development: Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

For a number of years now, the medical industry and public health officials have had a paramount common concern: the ongoing need to develop antibiotics.

However, the market for these therapies has been left mostly to smaller, biopharmaceutical companies. Much of the bigger companies have exited the space for a number of reasons and it has left a large therapy development gap.

Christian Sandrock, MD, MPH, FCCP, division vice chief of Internal Medicine and director of Critical Care at UC Davis Medical Center, takes a holistic approach when thinking about which antibiotics he will prescribe. For example, he looks at the patient's profile and in a case where the patient doesn’t have a stable home life, Sandrock does not want the patient to be hospitalized for two weeks and hooked up to an IV. He says this is looking at the downstream effects of treatment, and yet medicine today is not set up to look at these factors.

Contagion has its ongoing short series of video interviews to discuss these pathogens, and Sandrock sat down in a far-ranging interview to discuss how his institution is handling treatment, protocols on HABP/VABP, and his perspective on the therapy pipeline.

In this episode, Sandrock discusses antibiotic development as a clinician and trial investigator and his approach in deciding his antibiotic prescribing practices.