Aside: Please look closely at the forward calendar. In addition to two new webinars from GARDP’s REVIVE project, there is a meeting in Thailand in December that focuses on alternatives to antibiotics. I’m told that the program is primarily focused on veterinary and agricultural uses, but previous year’s attendees have found the discussion to have broad application
Dear All: The new Novo REPAIR impact fund ($165m over 5 years for antibacterials) is now open for applications — see the template at this link. Applications are due 15 May. Relatedly, Novo would like to hire a Senior Associate to help manage the fund. Primary qualifications are (1) scientific understanding of microbiology or a related
Dear All: It was a HUGE day at the Pew Charitable Trusts today! First, Commissioner Scott Gottleib gave a superb and very exciting speech. You can either read or listen to the entire speech. There is also a panel discussion after his talk that is worth replaying. Here are some highlights from Commissioner Gottleib’s talk: FDA is working to coordinate
Dear All: I’ve written before about BARDA’s DRIVe initiative (Division of Research Innovation and Ventures, launched June 2018) that seeks to develop countermeasures for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats, as well as for pandemic influenza and emerging infectious diseases. As a core part of this work, DRIVe Ventures seeks to link innovators and investors through creation of a VC-like
Long note alert— apologies! Get a cup of coffee and settle in… Dear All: My 22 Apr 2019 note entitled Scary, Scarier, Scariest: Achaogen / FT editorial / CBS “60 Minutes” on AMR (link) caused a number of you to write expressing your related concerns and frustrations. Many thanks for those thoughts! A core theme in those
There is a follow-up to this note. Go here to read it. Dear All: I don’t like writing about doom and gloom, but a sequence of events in the past few days really drives home both the importance of the work we do to create new antibiotics as well as the fragile state of the ecosystem supporting
Dear All: I trust you are now home after ECCMID in Madrid … it was an excellent meeting. Two new funding opportunities have recently crossed my radar: brief summaries and one key link for each are here with some further details below my signature. EU JPIAMR funding call: As part of its Virtual Research Institute
Dear All, Two very brief notes today… First, Pew Trusts continues to work to provide ways to understand the antibiotic pipeline. Building on their ongoing surveys (link), their latest contribution is a clever visualization tool that shows how antibiotics have moved forwards, backwards, and/or stopped during the period 2014-2018. Go here to see it in action and prepare to
Dear All: We had hints back in January that this was coming (see this post), but now it is really happening! In brief, UK’s NHS will test the world’s first subscription-style payment model in which payments delinked from volume are used to incentivise pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs for resistant infections. Below my signature, I’ve
Dear All: Apologies for inundating with updates … the last few days have been very data rich! In case you missed it, McCann et al. (Env Internat, “Understanding drivers of antibiotic resistance genes in High Arctic soil ecosystems,” link) have found NDM-1, one of our more famous recent resistance genes, in the Arctic. As they state in their abstract, “The