BUSPH Researcher Part of Team Awarded $150K for Antibiotics-Regulation Study
Access to effective antibiotics is critical to public health, but antibiotic resistance threatens to undermine many of the health gains from the past 60 years. Life in a post-antibiotic era would be rife with infectious diseases and many modern surgical procedures would be impossible. With that risk in mind, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has awarded a grant to a multidisciplinary team that includes BUSPH researcher Susan Foster, professor of international health.
The project received an 18-month, $150,000 RWJF grant to study the public health implications of antibiotic drug regulation, and includes a major empirical study on the relationship between changes in the legal environment and the introduction and conservation of antibiotics.
The team of researchers is led by Kevin Outterson, associate professor of law at Boston University School of Law, and Rosa Rodriguez-Monguio, associate professor at the School of Public Health & Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The researchers have experience in the legal, scientific and public health fields. Patent law supports the introduction of new antibiotics, but the legal environment gives many mixed signals regarding antibiotic conservation and the appropriate use of existing antibiotics.
Theoretical literature suggests that patent holders lack appropriate incentives to carefully protect antibiotics from resistance since their property right is time-limited. This study will empirically test this “patent holder waste” theory, as well as several others.
The grant is part of the RWJF’s Public Health Law Research Program (PHLR), which is based at Temple University’s Center for Health, Law, Policy and Practice. The grants aim to help policymakers and researchers understand how laws can affect public health.
Foster is also the director of public policy and education at the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics.
The research team includes public health and pharmaceutical researchers from BU, Ohio State, Minnesota and Harvard, as well as infectious disease experts from BU, Harvard, the National Institutes of Health, UCLA and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Team members include:
• Enrique Seoane, Ph.D. of the College of Pharmacy and College of Public Health at Ohio State University (project co-director);
• Brad Spellberg, associate professor of medicine at UCLA and a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s Antimicrobial Availability Task Force;
• Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH, a physician and researcher at the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School;
• Marc Lipsitch, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health;
• John Powers, senior medical scientist and infectious diseases attending at National Institutes of Health;
• John C. Rotschafer, professor at College of Pharmacy at University of Minnesota.