A major US legislative effort aimed at kickstarting the development of new antimicrobial agents and combating drug-resistant infections is one step closer to becoming law. Earlier today, Senators Richard Blumenthal (Democrat, Connecticut) and Bob Corker (Republic, Tennessee) introduced the Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now (GAIN) Act, a companion to a similar bill brought forward in the House of Representatives in June.

“Unfortunately, economic, regulatory and scientific challenges are stifling antibiotic innovation,” Sharon Ladin, director of the Pew Health Group’s Antibiotics and Innovation Project, said in a statement. “The GAIN Act takes an important first step toward overcoming these hurdles by creating economic incentives to spur the development of new antibiotics that we need to treat serious infections and save lives."

Not everyone agrees. As Paul Ambrose, president of the New York state-based Institute for Clinical Pharmacodynamics, argued in the pages of Nature Medicine earlier this year, the proposed legislation probably doesn’t do enough to meet its intended goals. In Ambrose’s July opinion article, he asserts that “the bill needs to simplify the path to regulatory approval, provide greater protection from generic competition and aid drug companies with intellectual property extensions, tax relief and guaranteed market commitments” to adequately shield drugmakers from generic competition. See ‘Antibiotic bill doesn’t GAIN enough ground’ for more.

Image: CDC