“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion” (Paulo Coelho) Dear All, The AMR Action Fund (https://www.amractionfund.com/) announcement today was awesome … indeed, it brought tears to my eyes. I listened in parallel to the presentations from Berlin and Washington where we had an all-star cast of US Senators, EU Members of
Dear All, I wrote on 3 Jan 2020 (link) about the NIAID contract intended to establish an innovative Chemistry Center for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (CC4CARB). The formal solicitation has now gone live and can be found here. The deadline for applications is 16 Mar 2020. Get to it! In parallel, there is a superb Wall Street Journal podcast dated 13 Jan 2020 about
Dear All, As a follow-up to yesterday’s relatively wonkish newsletter, I thought I’d quickly point out two things that may not have been obvious and one fun sidenote. First, those Lancet papers on Sustainable Access to Antibiotics are exciting but also a lot to absorb! As an introduction, I’d encourage you to start with this
Dear All, Well, ECCMID 2024 (Barcelona) has come and gone. I saw many of you there … but it’s always so busy … and the conference center was simply enormous! Could not keep up. But, it was great to get the sense that we’re back as a community … very good attendance. The one thing
Dear All (and with thanks to Patricia Bradford for co-authoring this newsletter), When you are seeking novelty, antibacterial discovery is hard … really, really, REALLY hard. And it gets even harder if you want activity vs. Gram-negative bacteria. As the latest proof of this, a paper from GARDP’s Blasco et al. describing use of an
This newsletter is part of a series — here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, (this one is Part 3), Part 4, and Part 5. Dear All, As a coda to the two newsletters on Chemicals, Drugs, and Halicin (link and link), XKCD gets the final word: Image reproduced with permission from https://xkcd.com/1217/. And, you might
Dear All, NIAID’s DMID (Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases) recently held a council meeting during which they proposed program concepts that encompassed both antibacterial therapies (including phage) as well as antifungal therapies for funding in FY 2026 (the year that would run from 1 Oct 2025 to 30 Sep 2026). There is no guarantee that
This newsletter is part of a series — here are the links to Part 1, (this one is Part 2), Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. Also relevant is the 5 April 2024 newsletter entitled “48,015 → 0: Antibacterial Discovery Is Hard. Really, Really Hard.“ Dear All (wonkish note alert!), The recent newsletter on chemicals, drugs, and halicin (link, see
Dear All, As part of their long-running project to maintain a useful view of the global antibacterial and antifungal pipelines, WHO yesterday announced a call for data on pre-clinical antifungal R&D projects. The scope is anything from Lead Optimization to pre-IND. Here are the links you need: The WHO webpage describing the call for data
This newsletter is part of a series — here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, (this one is Part 4), and Part 5. Dear All, We had fun in Feb 2020 discussing whether an antibacterial compound discovered using machine learning was a drug or just a chemical. Building on that conversation, the lab that wrote the