Comment the math doesn't work (Score 1) 245
The success rate for drug development is about 10-15%.
Now, you're probably spending $1B cumulative on all the failed drugs to get one hit. They key here is that you're not actually guaranteed to get a drug that works. You could easily spend more than $2B on a program like this, with a little bad luck.
Let's look at this differently. About 250 million antibiotics prescriptions are given out in the US every year. Let's have every one of those pay $10 over cost of manufacture and marketing (for example) to the drug companies who have developed new antibiotics in the prior 10 years (that collective effort helps all the antibiotics companies). Now you're spreading around an "extra" $2.5 billion every year, not just once. That's going to compensate for higher risk approaches more quickly and contribute to a longer term solution for this.