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 are BEAM’s AMR Conference and GAMRIC (formerly, the ESCMID-ASM conference series). Hope to see you there!
- [UPDATED LOCATION – To maximize options for global attendees, the conference location is now central London, UK] 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 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 will open on 5 May 2025; in the interim, 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 will run 5 May to 13 June and an application round for travel grants is expected to run in a similar time frame.
- 19-22 Oct 2025 (Georgia, USA): IDWeek 2025, the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Details pending; go here for the general meeting website.
- 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!
- 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.
Upcoming meetings of interest to the AMR community:
- [NEW] 22 May 2025 (9.30-11.00a CEST, virtual): GARDP REVIVE webinar entitled “Post-licensing clinical trials for advancing the use of antimicrobials.” Go here for details and to register.
- 19-23 June 2025 (Los Angeles): ASM Microbe, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. Go here for details.
- 10-13 Sep 2026 (Lisbon, Portugal): 6th ESCMID Conference on Vaccines. Go here for details.
- [UPDATED LOCATION] 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..
- [Application season is open — I am late in noticing!] 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.
- [NEW] 17-20 Sep 2025 (Porto, PT): 14th International Meeting on Microbial Epidemiological Markers (IMMEM XIV). Go here for details.
- [NEW] 9-13 Nov 2025 (Portland, OR, USA): ASM Conference on Biofilms. Go here for details and to register.
- 19-22 Oct 2025 (Georgia, USA): IDWeek 2025. See list of Top Recurring meetings, above.
- [NEW] 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.
- [NEW] 28-30 Jan 2026 (Las Vegas, NV, USA): IDSA and ASM have just announced (7 May 2025) 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 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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Dear All (unapologetically wonkish … very important material!), Let’s set the scene today by considering two quotes: Prosaic: “The successful treatment of patients with cancer has long depended on the capacity to manage infectious complications.” (Shropshire 2025, cited below) Blunt translation: “Your cancer will be controlled, but then you may die of infection.” (Abdul Ghafur,
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Manufacturing underpins access in LMICs: An update on cefiderocol
Dear All, No one is safe until we’re all safe! In the 7 April 2025 newsletter on antibiotic access (“UNSLAP: You reach for the antibiotic … and it’s not there!”), Louise Norton-Smith and I concluded that we need to work to address all the elements of the long and delicate supply chain from manufacturing to local