Pharmaceutical companies are asking the federal government to help fund the development of new medicines they say they cannot afford to make themselves, but are critical to saving lives from antibiotic resistance.
Drugmaking giants Pfizer, GSK and others have called on Labor to introduce a subscription-style model where it would pay them a fixed fee of up to $15 million a year per drug.
They admit the drugs, which will be used to fight drug-resistant superbugs the World Health Organisation claims are already killing more than one million people annually, will rarely be used but are essential to have on hand to save lives in the future.
The proposed scheme is similar to one expanded in the United Kingdom last month after a successful trial last year. The idea is it would provide incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicines which would otherwise be unprofitable because they are only used in emergencies and stocked in small volumes by hospitals.
It costs pharmaceutical companies about $1 billion to develop a new drug followed by years of clinical trials.
