One of the central factors which influences how the pharmaceutical industry operates is, of course, medicine and its effectiveness. If medicine is not effective, no consumer will use it, and it becomes unprofitable for developing and manufacturing.
Antimicrobial drugs, also known as antibiotics, are a significant component within pharmaceutical manufacturing. They help fight disease-causing bacteria and infectious diseases in both humans and animals, and play a major role in not only healthcare, but also veterinary and agricultural industries.
The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, however, is becoming a significant challenge to the current and future effectiveness of medical treatment. In order to properly prepare for and combat the increasing prevalence of bacteria resistance, it’s important to understand how it works and how it will affect your career in the pharmaceutical industry. If you’re interested in a career in pharmaceutical manufacturing, read on to learn more about the future of antibacterial resistance.
What Pharmaceutical Students Should Know about the Causes of Antibiotic Resistance
By nature, bacterium has the biological capability to ‘learn’ how to reduce or eliminate the effectiveness of an antibiotic drug through genetic mutation. Although antimicrobials are still the best defense against a bacterial infection, some bacteria can develop resistance after surviving the initial exposure to an antibiotic. They also divide quickly, meaning that they can rapidly replace lost bacterial cells and create more antibiotic-resistant microbes.
Antibiotic resistance is a natural process within bacteria’s development, but it can also be worsened by using antibiotics incorrectly and practicing poor infection prevention. This also affects pharmaceutical manufacturing, which must continually research and create solutions which use significant counteractive measures to severely curb the development of bacterial resistance with the addition of new drug products for the public.
Addressing R&D Investment Resistance in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Over the past four decades, the pharmaceutical industry has traditionally used a broad-spectrum cocktail of antibiotic medicine. This raises the concentration of antibiotic molecules from weak to strong in order to combat bacterial infection, but has the unintended side effect of increasing bacterial resistance as the microbes survive each stronger dosage. These cocktails also attack ‘good’ bacteria, which has significant consequences on the overall health of our body’s microbiome.
Fortunately, there is a rising trend in the pharmaceutical field as companies move to develop more comprehensive drugs, remove incentives to oversell antibiotics, and promote a more practical, waste-reductive use of antimicrobial products. By drawing more attention to risk management solutions, pharmaceutical manufacturing can evolve faster than bacteria can to properly combat its resistance capability.
Developing Antibacterial Biologics after Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Courses
One of the most promising alternative solutions to treat antibiotic resistance is the adoption of biologics. Biologics, or biopharmaceuticals, are drug products which are sourced from biologic material, rather than one that is chemically synthesized.
Biologics are capable of operating independently of antimicrobial activity in the immune system, which means that they can potentially avoid eliminating the ‘good’ bacteria. This helps boost immunity to bacteria, rather than kill the bacteria directly, which is an indirect means of addressing bacterial resistance defensively, rather than aggressively. Currently, the main obstacle of using biologics is the cost of their development and the slow evolution of the pharmaceutical industry to create and implement a manufacturing plan that properly integrates biologics into drug cocktails.
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