Dear All, The BEAM Alliance, along with its partners (CARB-X, the Novo REPAIR Impact Fund, the IMI AMR Accelerator, and the European Biotechnology Magazine) converted their annual AMR conference into a virtual event held 24-26 Aug 2021. As usual, it was excellent! I know we’re all really, REALLY tired of virtual meetings but the 2h/day x 3 day themed format worked well:
Dear All, Three global conversations to put on your listen-to-this list! One is this coming week, one is during ECCMID, and one is a video you can listen to now! First up and happening in just a few days on Thursday 29 Apr (10a-6p EST), please mark your calendar for a UN General Assembly High-Level interactive
Dear All, Building on the success of the previous Call to Action on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) conferences held in Berlin (2017) and Ghana (2018), the governments of Denmark, Colombia, Ghana and Zambia, with the International Centre for AMR Solutions (ICARS), UN Foundation, UNICEF, and the Wellcome Trust, are together organizing a follow-up Call to Action
Dear All, A view from Cambodia: “If we lose this antibiotic, there is no oral treatment left for typhoid here.” Good data drives good policy … it’s a lesson that I’ve really grown to appreciate. With this in mind, Wellcome Trust has just released a report entitled “How drug-resistant infections are undermining modern medicine –
Dear All, Today we have two interwoven topics to consider: An analysis of research priorities (not all technical!) and a triad of related initiatives, each of which comes with an opportunity for you to starting working on some of those priorities! First up, we have an excellent new paper summarizing the perspective of 32 experts
Dear All (and with thanks to Arjon van Hengel for co-authoring), As was discussed in newsletters dated 28 Nov 2020 (a general announcement) and 29 Apr 2021 (comments by Stella Kyriakides), the EU has announced an ambitious Pharmaceutical Strategy with initiatives that includes development of Pull incentives for antimicrobials among a number of other topics (see the 28
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
Dear All, Summer is coming to a close … hard to believe it’s almost September! To get you going for the fall, the ENABLE-2 consortium has announced a call to support hit-to-lead compound development by researchers at publicly-funded European universities. The call is focused on molecules with the potential to be direct-acting therapies for one or more of the following
Dear All, A recent paper by Hasegawa et al. and a multi-paper supplement, both in Clinical Infectious Diseases, combine to provide an interesting message. First, the paper by Hasegawa and colleagues. I’ve taken the title of this newsletter from an accompanying editorial by MacDougall who opens his commentary with “If there is one thing infectious
Dear All, I learned today from our colleagues at WHO that Alphafold has recently added the proteome of nearly all the WHO priority pathogens to their library of highly accurate prediction of protein structures. Alphafold was new to me and is amazing! Per our colleagues at WHO: AlphaFold is an AI system developed by DeepMind that