Requiem for the Magic Bullets describes the rise and fall of antibiotics:
The golden age of antibiotics began in 1944 with the widespread use of penicillin in Europe, which saved many thousands of lives during World War II. But the first sign that this new era of easily treatable bacterial infections would not last appeared just a couple of years later, with the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a wide variety of ailments, from skin infections to fatal pneumonia.By 1950, 40 percent of the staph strains in hospitals had already become immune to the drug. Now a form of staph known as methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA, which is resistant to nearly every known antibiotic, is responsible for the majority of tens of thousands of deaths a year from infections picked up in U.S. hospitals alone.
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Developing and testing a new antibiotic can take 10 years and cost more than $800 million, and pharmaceutical companies face an ever-changing maze of federal regulations to successfully bring a product to market. Several major drug manufacturers — including Abbott Laboratories and Eli Lilly and Company — have either drastically reduced their development of new antibiotics or given up on antimicrobial R&D altogether as an unprofitable enterprise.The fact that antibiotics are usually prescribed for only a short time — seven to 14 days, long enough to beat the infection or fail — makes them unattractive investments. Instead, the big money in Big Pharma is flowing toward the development of lifelong treatments for chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and HIV infection. Only two truly novel classes of antibiotics have been brought to the marketplace in the past decade.