Antibiotics underpin all of modern medicine, from routine major surgery through to caesarean sections and modern cancer therapies. These drugs have revolutionized how we practice medicine, but we are in a constant evolutionary battle to evade microbial resistance and this has become a major global public health problem. We have overused and misused these essential medicines both in the human an...

The initiative taken by the Government of the Netherlands in 2003 to develop a basis for a worldwide public health approach to the development of new medicines is welcome. Although new medicines have continued to enter the market during the half century in which public policies in this field have come to maturity, it is no secret that the development process has encountered grave problems and h...