Swiss Round Table on Antibiotics

What can we do to secure the availability of life-saving antibiotics and the functioning of our health care system? The Swiss Round Table on Antibiotics’ annual event on 4^th November 2024 provided opportunities for representatives of science, medicine, industry, and society to discuss new financing and reimbursement options and how roadblocks in their way to implementation might be recognised and removed. The event was also dedicated to the upcoming World AMR Awareness Week.

Here are some impressions:

Prof. Dr. Dr. med. Silvio Brugger (University Hospital Zurich):

• AMR is already a crisis, not just a future problem, also in Switzerland.
• Rising resistance against available antibiotics puts treatment success at risk, and innovative antibiotics often do not have a marketing authorisation in Switzerland.
• This presents significant challenges for clinicians to ensure success of highly specialised medical treatments - organ transplants, precision oncology, and burn care, among others.

Dr. Ramiro Dip and Dr. Florian Rechfeld (both Swiss Re):

• AMR has become a concern for insurers and re-insurers as it increases healthcare costs and damages trade and economies.
• Swiss Re had engaged in the running of a Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) to help health care systems in African countries quickly respond to Ebola outbreaks.
• Given that AMR is already present and evolving slowly, the presenters concluded that it requires medium-term and grassroots rather than emergency responses.

Chantal Morel, PhD (University of Bern):

• Many high-income countries are considering revenue guarantee- or subscription pull incentives for their capacity to ensure availability of new and older antibiotics in their territories.
• To achieve this effect the incentives must be credible, pre-established, delinked from sales volumes, and their magnitude must be in line with the full value of the antibiotic at stake and prices of other drugs.
• The presenter reminded that “we will only get what we pay for” and that joining forces will amplify the market signal.

The event was completed by a panel discussion with Prof. Lucas Böttcher (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management), Chantal Morel PhD, and Marie Petit (Villiger Valuation), navigated competently and knowledgably by Jan Posthumus (Basilea Pharmaceutica).

The panellists identified the often incomplete and fragmented data and non-harmonised data definitions as one of the reasons that render evidence-based policy shaping difficult. Furthermore, the full potential of science may not be exploited as grant conditions do not usually cater for multi-disciplinary approaches. Such approaches would however be required to do justice to the nature of AMR, a phenomenon with causes and impacts in numerous areas of science, health care, economy, and society across all One-Health domains.

The Swiss Round Table on Antibiotics extends its hearty thanks to those who made the event possible – the moderator, speakers and panellists. We also thank MCID and the hosting sponsor Swiss Re for their generous contributions.