Dear All, Earlier this year (20 Apr 2025 newsletter), Vivli announced their 2025 AMR Surveillance Data Challenge. Funded by Johnson & Johnson, Paratek, Pfizer and a National Institutes of Health (NIH) award1 the goal of this challenge is to produce new insights using existing industry AMR surveillance data. This is the third challenge issued by Vivli,
Dear All, PACE (Pathways to Antimicrobial Clinical Efficacy), a large UK-based public-private funder, have announced a £6 million funding round for projects in the hit-to-lead and lead optimization stages. The call is for antibacterial projects that target WHO priority Gram-negative pathogens (Enterobacteriaceae, A. baumannii and P. aeruginosa; see the AMR.Solutions summary of the priority pathogen
Dear All, I wrote in a 12 Dec 2024 newsletter (“Mirror Bacteria: An AMR threat of unprecedented magnitude”) about the really disturbing possible threat from creation of “mirror” bacteria in which all chiral elements of the bacterium are replaced by their enantiomeric counterparts. Such bacteria are predicted to be able to evade many (if not most)
Dear All, The EU have today announced the European Partnership on One Health AMR (OHAMR), a major AMR funding initiative that will run for 10 years (press release, webpage)! As a bit of background, the EU have invested more than EUR 1 billion in hundreds of AMR-focused projects over the past ~15 years. From my
Dear All (with thanks to Vega Masignani for co-authoring this newsletter), While the work needed to create new antibacterial agents is the primary topic of this newsletter, the need for vaccines of all types is definitely part of our community’s joint remit. As discussed in the 29 Mar 2021 newsletter (“Vaccines to turn back the
Dear All, I am pleased to learn that BARDA is holding a one-day innovation symposium on 20 Nov 2025. As you know, BARDA is a consistently creative funder of diverse medical countermeasures, including new antibiotics. For background, see these prior newsletters: 22 Jul 2025 newsletter: “BARDA RFP: Antibiotic for HABP/VABP or Bloodstream Infection” 5 Nov
Dear All: Two things today. Unrelated, but both relevant! WHO’s GLASS: WHO’s Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS) was created during October 2015 and seeks to obtain coordinated and consistent global estimates on resistance rates. In a major report released on 29 Jan 2018, GLASS now provides provides official national AMR data for the period 2016-17 from 40 countries
Dear All, Novel antibacterial agents, vaccines, and diagnostics will do little if they are not widely available and used responsibly. CDDEP’s recent report entitled “The State of the World’s Antibiotics in 2021” makes this very clear: “… more people in LMICs (low-middle-income countries) die from lack of access to antimicrobials than from resistant infection.” Hence, CARB-X has
Dear All, Back in 2019-2020, WHO developed a set of TPPs (TPP = Target Product Profile = A description of the desired attributes of a drug) for products for enteric fever, gonorrhea, neonatal sepsis, and urinary tract infections as guides for developers (see the 1 Sep 2019 newsletter for the original call for input and the link
Dear All, Addendum: This project ultimately led to publishing in May 2020 of a set of TPPs for enteric fever, gonorrhea, neonatal sepsis, and urinary tract infections as guides for developers. You can find those TPPs at https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240003897. WHO has developed a set of draft TPPs (target product profiles) for needed new antibiotics. As part of the