mmediately to martial analogies. 'Its an ongoing war of attrition, says David Livermore, the director of antibiotic resistance monitoring at the Health Protection Agency (HPA), the independent organisation set up by the government in 2003 to monitor infectious diseases in the UK. In th
arge drug companies point to a host of hurdles that stand in their way when it comes to developing new antibiotics. Chief among these is the fact that the obvious candidates for drug development have already been identified. 'A lot of the low-hanging fruit has gone, David Livermore says.
he other imperative, all agree, is for regulatory reform, particularly in America, where the FDA stands accused of regularly raising the bar that antibiotics must cross to get approved. The result is, as David Livermore says, 'a number of extremely complicated failures in clinical trials. S