Supporting the value of antibiotics through network changes and policies

Antibiotics are a fundamental resource for human health.

However, their value is progressively being destroyed due to several problems including lack of antibiotic innovation, misuse and scarce availability to patients.

These issues not only cause already today substantial costs to society and patient suffering, but also aggravate the global threat of antibiotic resistance.

So far, studies about causes and solutions to the challenges of value creation for antibiotics have focused on single aspects, mostly technical and medical, such as how to incentivize innovation or how to use antibiotics sparingly.

Thus, most studies neglect the full complexity of the problem, especially the organizational and interorganizational barriers causing hindrances in the antibiotics’ lifecycle, i.e., developing, supplying and using antibiotics.

This project takes instead a holistic socio-economic perspective to the lack of antibiotic value by analyzing the networks among the various organizations in the antibiotic field.

In particular, we aim to understand how these networks can be changed with the support of policies to reach a more sustainable creation of value for antibiotics.

Our multidisciplinary team, with researchers from business studies, industrial engineering and informatics, will apply innovative methods, such as interactive stakeholder analyses and computer-based simulations of antibiotic-related networks and public policies to explore how value creation for antibiotics can improve.