NATURE | Few new antibiotics are reaching the market; the last entirely original class of antibiotic was discovered in the late 1980s. One reason is that discovering and bringing antibiotics to market is not profitable for pharmaceutical companies. A 2017 estimate puts the cost of developing an antibiotic at around US$1.5 billion¹. Meanwhile, industry analysts estimate that the average revenue generated from an antibiotic’s sale is roughly $46 million per year. It is little wonder that big pharma has largely exited the antibacterial field or reduced investment in R&D. The result is that bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics faster than we are producing new antibiotics. Organizations like CARB-X are propping up early development, and big pharma recenlty launched a fund to help ensure that some later stage projects will be supported. But this is not a permanent fix. The world urgently needs new antibiotics and other products to address the rise of drug-resistance. Each year, 700,000 people die from drug-resistant bacterial infections and that number is growing. The economics of the antibiotics market need to be re-imagined and governments need to step up.