Avert An Antibiotics Armageddon? Forget The Patent System

Alarmists have been predicting an antibiotic crisis for decades. Now there are indications it has arrived. Without some rapid – and on the face of it, unlikely – medical advances, patients will soon be risking their lives by undergoing routine surgery and even from suffering minor scrapes and cuts, and diseases like tuberculosis could come “roaring back” with a vengeance. The latest attention-getting alarm was triggered by the case of an elderly Utah woman who died of a bacterial infection of a sort normally considered curable but which in fact resisted every antibiotic in the arsenal. In this New York Times oped, law professors Nicholas Bagley and Kevin Outtersonjan explain why the incentives implicit in the patent system, even with the well-intentioned tweaks resulting from some 2012 legislation (the Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now Act), fail to address the issue. Instead, they propose an alternative incentive system that circumvents the patent system entirely.