[refurb]

Two comments:

(1) You say it can't be left up to market economics, but two of the big hurdles to new antibiotic development are government regulations: (I) In the past the FDA was not very responsive to the resistance problem, if you had a new drug, you went through a normal review; luckily they have changed their approach recently (II) The way that Medicare and Medicaid pays for antibiotics doesn't encourage investment in novel agents

(2) I have to push back on the "going to the moon" type thing. This is more like we've already been to the moon and we need to go back and do something different. Drug companies know how to develop new antibiotics (not to say it's easy, but they have ideas) and they know how to get them approved. There are new discoveries all the time. We just need to create an ecosystem that encourages further investment.

[midas007]

Edge cases. The big picture is that it's not happening fast enough, which is why the government will need to step in and will need to assume a leadership role to push hard on this.

[refurb]

That's not going to happen. The gov't will change the regulatory and reimbursement environment but the heavy lifting will be done by academic and pharmaceutical researchers.