Swiss Round Table on Antibiotics

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.