Dear All: The UN Interagency Coordination on AMR Secretariat, hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO), is looking for a consultant to support the delivery of the work of the ad hoc Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance (IACG). As context, IACG’s mandate is to provide practical guidance for approaches needed to ensure sustained effective global action to address
Dear All: I wrote previously (link to newsletter) about WHO’s call for information about pre-clinical antibiotic R&D. With a due date of 18 Mar, this is your chance to help construct a survey that can be used to drive further initiatives. In support of this, WHO is now look for a contractor to work with
Dear All: Are you doing preclinical antibiotic R&D? If so, WHO wants to hear from you! As you know, WHO has published these two analyses of priority pathogens and antibacterial agents currently in Phases 1-3: Prioritization of pathogens to guide discovery, research and development of new antibiotics for drug resistant bacterial infections, including tuberculosis (2017, link)
Dear All, WHO has developed a set of draft TPPs (target product profiles) for needed new antibiotics. As part of the process, they are now opening a public consultation. Here is the essential text from their announcement: “The World Health organization (WHO) is developing target products profiles (TPPs) for needed antibacterial agents, providing the public
Dear All: As you know, WHO produced a pipeline update with a cut-off date of 1 July 2018. It’s now published both as a manuscript (Theuretzbacher et al. Lancet ID 2018, link) and a set of summary tables (link). Team WHO would like to update this analysis with a cut-off date of 1 Aug 2019. They
Dear All: Two interesting job posts this week. Could one of them be for you? First, CARB-X seeks a Boston-based full-time Chief of R&D (link). This is clearly a very senior role on the CARB-X leadership team: the R&D Chief would have responsibility across the entire CARB-X portfolio for the planning, review, awarding and monitoring of
Dear All: First, the methods behind the WHO Priority Pathogens List (PPL, released on 25 Feb 2017) have now been published by Tacconelli et al. in Lancet Infectious Diseases along with an editorial by Tillottson. As further context while you review these excellent papers, you might also find it helpful to have to hand this slide deck comparing the WHO PPL, the 2013
Dear All, I recently learned about the designation of Stanford as a WHO Collaborating Centre (WHOCC) for AMR and Stewardship. This caused me to dig a bit more into the way that WHO has created a global network of Collaborating Centres. WHOCC designation represents a sustained and productive collaboration with WHO (link). As an example, Stanford’s
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
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
