We need a billion-pound prize fund to kick-start the quest for new antibiotics

new antibiotic won’t make you rich. You’ll be a hero, but your drug will be cheap and rarely prescribed. The Office of Health Economics calculated the net present value of a new antibiotic at $50million (£37million), versus $1billion for other drug types.

But that’s good news, because this is a problem tailor-made for open innovation. When you don’t know how to find an answer, you need to throw it open to the world. When regulatory approval is gumming up the process, you don’t need more bureaucracy but entrepreneurial drive and the lubricant of public attention. And when rewards for success are meagre, and costs are high, you need a prize fund to motivate ingenuity.

Prizes to stimulate innovation are a proven technology, from the Orteig Prize that drove the outsider Charles Lindbergh to fly non-stop from New York to Paris, to the Ansari X Prize that gave us the first private spacecraft. In the UK, we even have an example in the field of antibiotics. Nesta’s £10million Longitude Prize is currently driving efforts to improve diagnosis and so limit antibiotic overprescription.

But we need new antibiotics as well as better stewardship of our current stock. And even the bureaucrats are starting to wake up. They talk of “pull incentives” and the “delinkage” of revenues and sales. But these are bloodless terms. We need a prize. A massive one, potentially in the billions and stumped up by philanthropists. Human ingenuity will find an answer. It might be a revival of phage therapy from the 1920s, or something using the new gene-editing technique, CRISPR. It’s probably something we haven’t even thought of. We need an answer. Let’s open things up.