Meetings
John’s Top Recurring Meetings
Virtual meetings are easy to attend, but regular attendance at annual in-person events is the key to building your network and gaining deeper insight. My personal favorites for such in-person meetings are below. Of particular value for developers, the small meeting format of BEAM’s AMR Conference and GAMRIC (formerly, the ESCMID-ASM conference series) creates excellent global networking. IDWeek and ECCMID are much larger meetings but also provide opportunities for networking with a substantial but focused audience via their Pipeline sessions. Hope to see you there!
- 1-3 Oct 2025 GAMRIC, the Global AMR Innovators Conference (London, UK). Formerly the ESCMID-ASM Joint Conference on Drug Development for AMR, this meeting series is now in its 10th year and is being continued under the joint sponsorship of CARB-X, ESCMID, BEAM Alliance, GARDP, LifeArc, Boston University, and AMR.Solutions. The ongoing series will continue the successful format of prior meetings with a single-track meeting and substantial networking time (go here to see details of the outstanding 2024 meeting).
- Registration is now open and the preliminary agenda can be found at that same link (https://www.gamric.org/). The meeting will be limited to approximately 300 attendees, so please be sure to register promptly to avoid disappointment!
- The abstract submission window (same link as registration) runs until 13 June.
- Application for travel grants (same link as registration) are accepted through 2 June.
- [Note call for IDWeek Pipeline presentations] 19-22 Oct 2025 (Georgia, USA): IDWeek 2025, the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Go here to register. For those who would like a substantial opportunity to present a product (see also ECCMID), note the call for applications to present at an IDWeek Pipeline Session; go here to submit an application for your compound or diagnostic.
- 3-4 Mar 2026 (Basel, Switzerland): The 10th AMR Conference. Sponsored by the BEAM Alliance, the 9th AMR Conference has just concluded and it’s again been an excellent meeting! Please mark your calendar for next year. You can’t register yet, but details will appear here!
- [Note that Pipeline Monday will again occur in 2026] 17-21 April 2026 (Munich, Germany): ESCMID Global 2026, the annual meeting of the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. You can’t register yet, but you can go here for details on the outstanding 2025 meeting. For those who would like a substantial opportunity to present a product (see also IDWeek), I also know that the meeting schedule will again include Pipeline Monday; go here to see details from 2025.
Upcoming meetings of interest to the AMR community:
- [NEW] 5-6 June 2025 (Coral Gables, Florida and also virtual): Scientific Meeting on Candida auris hosted by University of Miami Miller School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases. This is a follow-up to a meeting hosted in 2020 by NIH. Go here for details.
- 19-23 June 2025 (Los Angeles): ASM Microbe, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. Go here for details.
- [NEW] 10-11 Sep 2025 (Ghent, BE): Organized by a group at Ghent University in collaboration with the ESCMID Study Group for Non-Traditional Antibacterial Therapy (ESGNTA), the Phage Protein Meeting is an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to advancing the field of phage proteins for infection control that seeks to bring together academic researchers and professionals working with phage proteins such as phage lysins, tail fibers, tailspikes, depolymerases, and tailocins. Note that the focus here is on phage proteins rather than phage themselves. Go here for details and to register.
- Note that the 10-11 Sep meeting is followed in Ghent on 12 Sep by the 4th annual meeting of BSVoM (Belgian Society for Viruses of Microbes). This meeting is broader than therapeutics, providing an “interdisciplinary perspective on virus of microbes, ranging from basic research to industrial developments and clinical use.” Go here for details.
- 10-13 Sep 2025 (Lisbon, Portugal): 6th ESCMID Conference on Vaccines. Go here for details.
- 1-3 Oct 2025 GAMRIC, the Global AMR Innovators Conference (London, UK; formerly the ESCMID-ASM Joint Conference on Drug Development for AMR). See list of Top Recurring meetings, above.
- 11-19 Oct 2025 (Annecy, France, residential in-person program): ICARe (Interdisciplinary Course on Antibiotics and Resistance) … and 2025 will be the 9th year for this program. Patrice Courvalin orchestrates content with the support of an all-star scientific committee and faculty. The resulting soup-to-nuts training covers all aspects of antimicrobials, is very intense, and routinely gets rave reviews! Seating is limited, so mark your calendars now if you are interested. Applications are being accepted from 20 Mar to 21 Jun 2025 — go here for more details.
- 17-20 Sep 2025 (Porto, PT): 14th International Meeting on Microbial Epidemiological Markers (IMMEM XIV). Go here for details.
- 9-13 Nov 2025 (Portland, OR, USA): ASM Conference on Biofilms. Go here for details and to register.
- [NEW] 18-24 Nov 2025 (global, multiple locations): World Antibiotic Awareness Week (WAAW) is convened annually on 18-24 Nov by WHO with national events (e.g., CDC’s US Antibiotic Awareness Week (USAAW); ECDC’s 18 Nov European Antibiotic Awareness Day) occurring around the globe. Details will follow as events become visible.
- 19-22 Oct 2025 (Georgia, USA): IDWeek 2025. See list of Top Recurring meetings, above.
- 29-31 Oct 2025 (Bengalaru, India): ASM Global Research Symposium on the One Health Approach to Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), hosted in partnership with the Centre for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Go here for details and to register.
- 28-30 Jan 2026 (Las Vegas, NV, USA): IDSA and ASM have announced a new US-based meeting series entitled IAMRI (Interdisciplinary Meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance and Innovation) and described as a “forum for collaboration and exploration around the latest advances in antimicrobial drug discovery and development.” You can’t register yet (further details anticipated June 2025) but you can go here to see general details about the new meeting.
- 3-4 Mar 2026 (Basel, Switzerland): The 10th AMR Conference sponsored by the BEAM Alliance. See list of Top Recurring meetings, above.
- 8-13 Mar 2026 (Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco, Italy): 2026 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) entitled “Antibacterials of Tomorrow to Combat the Global Threat of Antimicrobial Resistance.” A Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) will be held the weekend before (7-8 Mar) for young doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. Space for the GRS and the GRC is limited; for details and to apply, go here for the GRC and here for the GRS.
- 17-21 April 2026 (Munich, Germany): ESCMID Global 2026, the annual meeting of the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. See Recurring Meetings list, above.
Self-paced courses, online training materials, and other reference materials:
- OpenWHO: “Antimicrobial Resistance in the environment: key concepts and interventions.” Per the webpage for the course, it will teach you “…why addressing AMR in the environment is essential and gain insights into how action can be taken to prevent and control AMR in the environment at the national level.” This course builds on WHO’s 2024 Guidance on wastewater and solid waste management for manufacturing of antibiotics. For further reading, see also the 25 Sep 2023 newsletter entitled “Manufacturing underpins both access and stewardship: Cefiderocol as a case study” and the 28 Jan 2024 newsletter entitled “EMA Concept Paper: Guidance on manufacturing of phage products”.
- GARDP’s REVIVE website provides an encyclopedia covering a range of R&D terms, recordings of prior GARDP webinars, a variety of viewpoint articles, and more! Check it out!
- GARDP’s https://antibioticdb.com/ is an open-access database of antibacterial agents.
- The CARB-X website provides a range of recordings from its webinars, bootcamps, and more. A bit of browsing would be time well spent!
- British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy offers an eLearning section: Education – The British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.
Dear All,
Back in 2022, I wrote a newsletter about the World Health Organization putting out a call to form a Task Force of AMR Survivors. The Task Force of Antimicrobial Resistance Survivors was established last October and its members have been busy ever since!
There are currently 12 members, each serving 2 years, and they hail from all over the globe. They kicked off their work with a meeting in Geneva last October and have been putting out quarterly reports about their efforts (Jan-Mar 2024 and April-June 2024). From the “Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is invisible. I am not.” campaign to speaking at the UNGA HLM on AMR to attending a wide variety of events, every member of the Task Force has been actively putting a face to the problem of AMR.
21 Nov 2024 addendum: The Quadripartite Joint Secretariat on AMR (QJS-AMR) have today announced a call for expressions of interest to fill current vacancies on the task force. Could this be you? Go here for more details: https://www.amrleaders.org/news-and-events/news/item/21-11-2024-call-for-expressions-of-interest.
They’ve also published a white paper entitled “Meaningful Engagement of Patients, Survivors and Carers in Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance“ which seeks to promote antimicrobial resistance advocacy by being a “guide technical experts and policy-makers in identifying opportunities for meaningful engagement of survivors and people with lived experience of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to advance international, national and local AMR agendas.”
Two of the Task Force members, Ella Balasa and Rob Purdie, agreed to sit down with me to discuss their experience as part of the Task Force. As you’ll learn by listening to the video, Ella has cystic fibrosis and Rob has Disseminated Coccidioidomycosis, aka Valley Fever. They both have experienced terrifying infections and, without the right antibiotics at the right time, they could easily not be here to share their stories.
I really want to encourage you to take time to watch the video. It’s one thing to read my summary, it is another to hear their voices!
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