Professor Kevin Outterson Offers Expert Testimony Before House of Representatives Committee on Antibiotic Resistance
On September 18 President Obama signed an executive order outlining his plan to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a growing public health crises that claims approximately 37,000 lives a year. The following day the House Energy & Commerce Committee held a hearing entitled 21st Century Cures: Examining Ways to Combat Antibiotic Resistance and Foster New Drug Development.
The hearing brought together a panel of policy experts, including the Food & Drug Administration’s director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Director of Medical Programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts, as well as senior executives from two drug companies, a clinical professor of medicine, and Boston University School of Law’s Kevin Outterson.
Outterson is widely recognized for his work on the legal ecology of antimicrobial resistance. He serves as a founding member of the CDC Antimicrobial Resistance Working Group and is an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London. He publishes frequently on the need to overhaul the current economic system driving antibiotic research and development, most recently in a paper entitled “New Business Models for Sustainable Antibiotics.” On October 6, Professor Outterson will give the Keynote Speech at the kickoff of a major European effort in Geneva to fix the broken business model for antibiotics:http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v13/n10/full/nrd4455.html
In his testimony, Outterson argued for, among other things, better incentives for pharmaceutical companies to produce new antibiotics, noting that the benefit will outweigh the expense in producing them. “But,” he says, “we should think beyond the pill and also invest similar amounts of money in bacterial vaccines, diagnostics and other devices, basic NIH research, surveillance, and infection control. Bacterial vaccines have a clear impact on health, reducing the need for antibiotics by preventing infections.”
President Obama’s executive order calls for a national task force to develop a five-year action plan that outlines goals, metrics for measuring success, and associated timelines for implementation. “The White House’s plan satisfies an urgent need for action,” Professor Outterson says. “I hope it is seriously discussed and adopted in Congress.”
Watch Professor Outterson’s testimony (beginning at 1:45).
