The emergence of a deadly new superbug in the U.S. should spur the Senate to vote on legislation to create new antibiotics, a leading Democrat said Tuesday.
Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., led off a hearing on superbugs in the House Energy & Commerce Committee by pushing for the Senate to approve a package of biomedical research. “Maybe this urgent issue can be used to help enact this important law,” she said.
The hearing was convened a few weeks after the emergence of a deadly superbug in a woman in Pennsylvania. The superbug is resistant to the last-resort antibiotic colistin, and has so far only been found overseas.
Last year, the House passed the 21st Century Cures Act, which focused on speeding up approval of needed medical devices and drugs. Included in that legislation was the Antibiotic Development to Advance Patient Treatment Act, which directs the Food and Drug Administration to approve new antibiotics based on smaller patient populations.
The bill aims to address the dwindling pipeline of new antibiotics to combat superbugs. But while it passed in the House, it stalled in the Senate, which has yet to reach an agreement on funding for the National Institutes of Health.
“We need new classes of antibiotics,” said Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, at the hearing. “There is a widely acknowledged market failure when it comes to antibiotics.”
