Dear All, If you are attending ESCMID Global in Vienna this year, mark your calendar for two major events. I hope to see you at both of them! First, there will be a Science Policy Forum afternoon (with networking reception) on Friday, 11 April 2025. Refined over the past two iterations of ECCMID, this event was
Dear All, A huge announcement today backed by the combined power of the Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk, and Wellcome! I am going to quote liberally from their materials: Responding to the problem of AMR, “… the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF), Wellcome, and the Gates Foundation (GF) are jointly launching a new initiative, Gram-Negative Antibiotic Discovery
Dear All, Sadly, I must report that the 27th meeting of PACCARB (the US Presidential Advisory Council on Combatting Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria) planned for 28-29 Jan 2025 has been cancelled “as the new Administration considers its plan for managing federal policy and public communications.” This 22 Jan 2025 article in the New York Times provides additional details
Dear All, Three things for today along with some great acronyms! To start, we have an announcement of the first ever National One Health Framework to Address Zoonotic Diseases and Advance Public Health Preparedness in the United States (NOHF-Zoonoses) (website, .pdf of the framework). As a reminder, a zoonosis is an infection that jumps from
Dear All (and with thanks to Damiano for taking the lead on this newsletter), We start the new year with good news from Rome! On Saturday 28 December 2024, the Italian Senate passed the government’s 2025 budget, giving parliament’s final approval to a financial package which includes a pull incentive for innovative antibiotics. As promised by Minister
Dear All, I wrote in the 1 Dec 2024 newsletter about the excellent paper by Baraldi et al. that introduced us to the 6 possible meaning of “lack of access.” Since that newsletter, a bit of back-and-forth has produced a UNSLAP as a pronounceable acronym for the 6 meanings: (U)nregistered, (N)ever registered (or, not registered),
Dear All (wonkish but stick with it … I’m going to try very hard to de-wonk it), In an absolutely terrifying paper and technical report in today’s issue of Science, we are introduced in detail to the concept of “mirror” bacteria in which all chiral elements of the bacterium are replaced by their enantiomeric counterparts.
Dear All, I’ve written before about the Vivli AMR Surveillance Data Challenge that seeks creative ways to reuse MICs from surveillance datasets (the 24 April 2023 newsletter covered the 2023 Challenge; the 15 June 2024 newsletter flagged the 2024 Challenge). As a reminder, Vivli is a clinical data sharing platform that was created in 2013 from a
Dear All, We often talk about the problem of lack of access to new antibiotics. In late 2021, for example, we explored data showing that multi-year delays in access to new antibiotics were common even in high income countries (19 Aug 2021 newsletter with YouTube discussion). But as we’ll learn today, that analysis considers only one
Dear All, Just released, the 2026 NIAID DMID Omnibus Broad Agency Announcement (HHS-NIH-NIAID-BAA2025-1) seeks applications for projects to treat, prevent, and diagnose bacterial, fungal, and viral infections. Of interest for this community, the BAA’s Research Area 001 seeks applications by 21 Feb 2025 for bacterial and fungal projects across thee topics (see below my signature for