Opinion: Innovative ways to pay for new antibiotics will help fight superbugs

Antibiotics are the most important drug class in human history. Without them, minor infections like strep throat or urinary tract infections could turn deadly. Heart surgery, cancer treatment, and virtually everything else that happens in a hospital would be far more dangerous than it is today. But if we keep taking them for granted, and fail to provide innovative approaches to funding the development of new antibiotics, drug-resistant microbes will get the upper hand.

Although we’ve made great strides in the development of antibiotics since the discovery of penicillin in the early 20th century, we aren’t keeping up with the — common bacteria that have acquired genes that make them resistant to most or all of our antibiotics. “[T]he end of the road isn’t very far away for antibiotics,” Dr. Tom Frieden, the former head of the Centers for.