Historicising the Empty Antibiotic Pipeline

The “Historicising the Empty Antibiotic Pipeline - Cultures & Codes” project was part of an international research consortium on the history of the dry antibiotic pipeline. Supported by the Norwegian Research Council between 2021 and 2025, research clusters in Oslo, Copenhagen, Strasburg, Madrid, and Dublin explored how the antibiotic pipeline ran dry from the 1970s onwards. In addition to critically examining existing narratives of the dry antibiotic pipeline, researchers assessed how new genomic and IT technologies, business models, and social and gender dimensions of microbiological research impacted antibiotic development.

At UCD in Dublin, the “Historicising the Empty Antibiotic Pipeline - Cultures & Codes” cluster employed a mix of historical, ethnographic, and oral history approaches to understand how: (a) post-war ties between industry, science, and public health changed in the face of new biotech and venture capital actors employing targeted, sequence-based analysis and automated screening; (b) how existing infrastructures like culture collections and laboratory networks evolved in the face of privatisation, patenting reforms, and new genomic and computerised technologies.

Mirza Portillo Alas was the PhD researcher on this project and her obtained her PhD degree in June 2025. Her dissertation is titled: How the Pipeline Ran Dry - Towards a Critical Historiography of the Antibiotic Pipeline (1980-2020)".

You can find a list of all project-related outputs here: https://www.emptypipeline.org/news-outputs 

A witness seminar on the emergence of new financial models for antibiotic development from the 1990s onwards can be found here: https://hal.science/hal-04715255v1/file/2024%20Emerging%20Financial%20Models%20for%20Antibiotic%20Development.pdf