Preclinical pipeline overview / Help fund a movie about AMR!

Dear All: Two things today.

First, Ursula Theuretzbacher, Miloje Savic, Christine Ardal, and Kevin Outterson have published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery a brief but instructive snapshot of the global preclinical antibacterial pipeline. This report nicely complements the recent WHO analysis of the clinical pipeline that concluded that “the world is running out of antibiotics.”

You’ll want to read the paper yourself (it’s brief and open access), so I’ll just summarize by saying that Ursula and colleagues have analyzed applications from Year 1 of the CARB-X initiative, found a good diversity of approaches, and observed that this shows an encouraging alignment with the WHO priority pathogen list. This is encouraging, but these preclinical programs have still a long way to go, will require a lot of support en route, and are of course high risk. Discovery is hard, so let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Second, would you like to help fund a movie about antibiotic resistance? Bill Mudge, Jean Mudge, and Bob Milley are co-producers at Recombinant Films LLC. They have been steadily pulling together a internationally targeted documentary entitled Beating SuperBugs: Can We Win? for a generally educated but uninitiated audience. The documentary will focus on four of the CDC’s top superbug threats: tuberculosis; MRSA; C. difficile; and CRE. 

Using funds from a 2015 Kickstarter campaign, the team are now within about $100k of completing the film for release. If you’d like to help them get to done, you can make a tax-deductible contribution through their 501(c)3, non-profit fiscal sponsor, Catticus Corporation, Berkeley, CA. I think that non-technical material of this type is really valuable and I’m sure they’d appreciate any amount you might send.

All best wishes, –jr

John H. Rex, MD | Chief Medical Officer, F2G Ltd. | Expert-in-Residence, Wellcome Trust. Follow me on Twitter: @JohnRex_NewAbx. See past newsletters and subscribe for the future: http://amr.solutions/blog/

Upcoming meetings of interest to the AMR community:

Share

EPA (part 2, streptomycin!) / $104m ARPA-H AMR project

Dear All (OK, so now it’s 5 newsletters in as many days … exciting times … can’t keep up!), Two follow-up items today. First, yesterday’s newsletter about EPA’s concept note regarding AMR risks of pesticides prompted one of your fellow readers to remind me about this lawsuit filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit: Case

BARDA Medical Countermeasures BAA: Substantial updates

Dear All (and yes, back-to-back newsletters … lots of action this week!): BARDA have today released a new version of their long-running BAA (Broad Agency Announcement, formerly BAA-18-100-SOL-00003) that seeks medical countermeasures (MCMs) for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats, pandemic influenza, and emerging infectious diseases. The new BAA is BAA-23-100-SOL-00004 and has been completely reorganized and

Appropriate duration of antimicrobial dosing in food animal care

Dear All,  I’ve watched with interest the way that FDA’s CVM (Center for Veterinary Medicine) has been working steadily with the veterinary community as a whole to reduce antibiotic resistance pressure by improving the way antibiotics are used in animal care. The titles of these prior newsletters give you a feel for some aspects of

Scroll to Top