There is a gap between the burden of infections due to multidrug-resistant bacteria and the development of new antibiotics to tackle the problem. This report gives an account of facts and figures that would allow reasonable predictions of the extent of this gap in the coming years and calls for a European and global strategy to address the problem urgently.

One of the conclusions of the report is that there is a particular lack of new antibiotics with new targets or mechanisms of action against multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria. Only two such agents with new or possibly new targets and documented activity were identified, both in early phases of development