North West joins Obama’s antibiotic crusade
ALDERLEY Park’s AMR Centre is to get $100m over five years as it joins a new global public-private partnership created by US President Barack Obama to focus on the health threat posed by antibiotic resistance.
The AMR Centre is to become a lead player in the world’s largest partnership CARB-X – Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator, a new organisation that aims to rejuvenate the pipeline of anti-microbial drugs and diagnostics.
It has grown out of President Obama’s 2015 Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria (CARB) initiative and will coordinate R&D funding of at least $350m around the world over the next five years.
The AMR Centre, a public-private partnership which was itself only established in February this year, is one of five organisations which will play a central role in the new partnership announced by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The biggest funder is the US-based Biomedical Advanced Research Authority (BARDA). It will provide $30m in grants to CARB-X during the first year – and up to $250m over five years.
The AMR Centre is expected to receive up to $14m in matched funding from CARB-X in year one – and $100m in total over the next five years.
The combination of its own resources and the contributions from CARB-X means that the AMR centre expects to be able to direct $200m on a range of R&D projects.
These financial resources will be used to help small and medium sized businesses progress their R&D projects into clinical trials.
The Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation focused on biomedical research, will also contribute funding, along with its expertise in overseeing projects of this kind.
Within Europe antibiotic resistance already claims 25,000 lives a year, but fatality rates are expected to rise dramatically. A recent review for the UK government, led by leading economist Lord O’Neill, concluded that AMR has the potential to be responsible for 10 million extra deaths globally each year by 2050 – more than currently claimed by cancer – and reverse decades of advances in medicine.
“The creation of CARB-X is one of the most important steps yet in terms of rethinking how we deal with AMR and the partnership will have an impact around the world,” said Dr Peter Jackson, steering group chairman of the AMR Centre.
“We share the same goal of accelerating a new pipeline of treatments and diagnostics by working on new drug development programs. We will do this in our own labs as well as in collaboration with other organisations, in particular providing support to small and medium-sized businesses and research institutes which have exciting new approaches to AMR.”
The international partnership will support a suite of products through early preclinical development to a stage where they can be taken forward by private or public investment.
Led by executive director and principal investigator Kevin Outterson, Professor of Law at Boston University, the CARB-X partners will pool their comprehensive scientific, technical, business and legal expertise to help supported companies navigate the maze of regulatory steps, studies and data collection required for new drugs and other products to gain approval by US and/or European regulators.
