More than half a million new cases of gonorrhea were reported in the U.S. in 2024, and worldwide, the sexually transmitted disease, which can cause infertility, has growing resistance to existing treatments. In 2025, the Global Antibiotic Research & Development Partnership announced that a new antibiotic, zoliflodacin, specifically intended to treat gonorrhea in a single dose, had been approved by the FDA. GARDP’s executive director, Dr. Manica Balasegaram, cites the approval as a success of the partnership between the nonprofit, which organized the clinical trials that showed the drug was 90% effective and will be commercializing it in many countries, and Innoviva, the pharmaceutical company that developed the drug. “It’s a sign that we can develop very successful public-private partnerships in an area that is of critical public health need globally: the development of new antibiotics to address the emerging threat of antimicrobial resistance,” he says.
