BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello and welcome to the first in our new series of the bottom line.

There aren't many technological advances that have come and then gone,

without being replaced by something better.

I can only think of one, in fact, supersonic air travel.

But today we're going to talk about antibiotics,

a 20th century innovation which might effectively disappear as bacterial resistance advances.

No new class of antibiotics have been discovered or approved since 1980. And it's not as though

this isn't a problem that we didn't know about. Alexander Fleming, the father of modern antibiotics, warned us of the risks of what were then miracle drugs as early as 1938.

That was before he received his Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin.

How could we have let this happen? Why, in a world, replete with so much innovation,

are more antibiotics not being developed? We have to ask if business can help solve this,

and what do we have to do to make that happen? Well, I've three guests well qualified

to help us understand the science, as well as the economic aspects of the problem.

First of all, Seema Patel, medical director of the hospital business at Pfizer, UK, Ireland and the Nordics.

And Seema, most people would have heard of Pfizer.

Just tell us a little about the company.

It's one of the world's big ones.

So it is, Pfizer is a huge company and actually mentioned that I am part of the hospital business unit,

and that's where

our anti-infective portfolio actually sits and we have 114 anti-infectives and that includes

products that work against fungus, bacteria and viruses so there's lots of different microbes

...