Experts call for united front against antimicrobial resistance
Dr Anuj Sharma, Technical and Team Focal Point for AMR at the WHO Country Office for India, explained that AMR not only threatens public health through increased healthcare costs, longer hospital stays, and higher mortality, but also undermines medical advancements and affects global GDP.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
2 days ago
- Time of India
Project Parivartan to reduce hospital acquired infections: Health min
Panaji: A four-year project named Project Parivartan, aiming to reduce hospital-acquired infections and curb antimicrobial resistance, is being implemented in all 41 public health facilities, health minister Vishwajit Rane said on Wednesday. He held a detailed review meeting with representatives of Pfizer India, Americares India Foundation, the GMC dean, the director of DHS, and other senior representatives to assess the progress of the project. The strategically designed intervention to address the growing threat of AMR and hospital-acquired infections is being implemented by GMC and the directorate of health services in partnership with Americares India Foundation and supported by Pfizer's corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme. 'Project Parivartan will help drive safer healthcare practices, improving patient outcomes and public health,' Rane said. The project was launched on Nov 27 last year, and a team of 19 professionals were trained. Stakeholder engagement meetings were held with officials from GMC, DHS, and the hospital infection prevention and control committee at GMC. Ethical approvals were granted by the state ethical committee and the institutional ethical committee of GMC. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Bergisch Gladbach: GEERS sucht 700 Testhörer für Hörgeräte ohne Zuzahlung GEERS Undo Baseline assessments were initiated in health facilities under the directorate of health services and are expected to be undertaken in GMC soon. Project Parivartan is constructing a robust statewide framework for antimicrobial stewardship and infection prevention control, with its core mission to reduce hospital-acquired infections and ensure the responsible and judicious use of antibiotics within Goa's healthcare system. It is also conducting baseline assessments to understand the current AMR situation in Goa and establishing surveillance tools to monitor trends in antibiotic resistance. Under the project, specialised training programmes are being delivered for healthcare professionals on AMS and IPC. The project is also looking at enhancing the capacity of medical teams to create a safer healthcare environment and promote rational antibiotic prescribing. The WHO recognised AMR as one of the top global public health and development threats. The Union govt implemented measures to curb AMR, establishing a national task force in 2010 and developing a national policy on AMR containment in 2011, followed by a national action plan on AMR (2017-2021). State govt has aligned both with India's national action plan and WHO's global AMR containment strategy through Project Parivartan, Rane said.
Hindustan Times
5 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Talent loss a major threat to addressing global AMR crisis
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is turning out to be one of the major health calamities, with two million deaths projected to occur in India alone by 2025 and 10 million globally. While the discovery of penicillin in 1928, revolutionised the field of medicine and saved millions of lives, the industry has witnessed a constant decline in the development of new antibiotics ever since then. The lack of resources and high investments are the widely considered reasons for this gap, but one key aspect that remains largely overlooked is the loss of potent scientific and research talent for more than two decades. In an in-depth research report, Leaving the Lab, AMR Industry Alliance highlights alarming data on this brain drain phenomenon. According to the study, research and development (R&D) workforce is limited with approximately 3,000 AMR researchers currently active in the world, compared to around 46,000 for cancer and 5,000 for HIV/AIDS. Meanwhile, the total number of authors on all AMR publications declined from a high of 3,599 in 1995 to just 1,827 in 2020. Investigators with a focused research interest in AMR too have further declined since the mid-1990s, falling from a peak of 1,300 to less than 700 by 2020. The situation is even more worrisome in the context of India. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), India contributes only 1% to the global antibacterial R&D pipeline, whereas 84% of this research is concentrated in high-income countries, with another 12% in upper-middle-income economies. For a country like India which not only carries one of the world's highest burdens of AMR but also contributes meaningfully to AMR resistance on the global level, the lack of focus on research and innovation severely undermines the efforts to combat this threat. The 2016 UNGA High-Level Meeting on AMR discussed a number of actions, including talent loss to address these challenges globally. However, the industry is still witnessing slow progress on work to contain AMR. This brain drain could further exacerbate the situation if necessary steps aren't taken to tackle the crisis at hand. This current trajectory of AMR research is deeply troubling and stems from a fundamental market failure. Currently most of the private investors and governments prefer directing fund to research in other disease areas, creating a vacuum for companies and SMEs who actively want to amplify work in the field of AMR. And even if some of the biggest players in the market invest in creating new antibiotics, they often don't attract investment. In recent years, AstraZeneca, Novartis, and Johnson & Johnson have all exited or cut back their work on AMR, including closing R&D facilities, selling antimicrobial portfolios, ending AMR development, and letting go of research teams. While SMEs are more agile and innovative in early-stage research and development of antibiotics in comparison to the bigger players, their situation too is marred by lack of funding globally. According to a report by the BEAM Alliance, 54% of the SME members struggle with enough funds to cover even a year's worth of operations and fear bankruptcy. Biopharmaceutical company, Achaogen is a prime example. Even after securing US FDA approval for plazomicin, the company was still forced to declare bankruptcy in April 2019 – after spending nearly a billion dollars and over a decade developing the antibiotic. This phenomenon further exacerbates the broken market for antimicrobials where major pharmaceutical companies are unable to offer long-term careers as they either fear bankruptcy or lack of investments and funding to continue research. On the incentives front, clinicians in antimicrobial and antifungal R&D teams face significant pay gaps when compared to fellowships across all other specialties. In 2022, 44% of infectious disease fellowships went unfilled in the US – more than double the proportion of unfilled fellowships across all specialties. A 2022 Medscape report showed a pay gap of $4,000 between infectious disease doctors and internal medicine doctors across the US, despite the additional years of training and debt required. While India has made commendable strides in public health in the recent years, AMR continues to represent an unprecedented challenge--it can't be resolved by treatment alone. As the most populated country across the globe, India needs to have a strong, sustained investment in scientific human capital to challenge the future risks related to AMR. The government has initiated varied efforts in identifying and filling gaps in knowledge on the development of new antibiotics and alternatives to existing one to combat AMR. For instance, department of biotechnology (DBT) and Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC's) mission to amplify research in the identification of new bacterial targets; call for proposals under the AMR Interdisciplinary Research (AMRIT) Team Grants, to foster collaborative research in AMR and collaboration with UK-based innovation charity organisation, Nesta, to create a pipeline of innovators who can develop a point–of–care diagnostic test to conserve antibiotics for future generations, are some of the progressive steps in fight against AMR. Additionally, ICMR's flagship initiative Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance & Research Network (AMRSN) to generate high-quality data on AMR trends across India through 30 tertiary care hospitals and research institutions; funding R&D in areas such as rapid diagnostics, novel antimicrobials with international bodies like WHO, CDC (USA), and the Fleming Fund are other examples of India's efforts. Despite these efforts, challenges do persist in providing the much-needed boost in generating a talented workforce of scientists, researchers and innovators to fight against AMR. One of the major systemic challenges facing loss of scientific talent is due to academia–industry leakages. Despite producing highly skilled microbiologists, pharmacologists, and biotechnologists, LMICs like India struggle to retain researchers in the AMR domain due to inadequate funding, limited career pathways and lack of translational research ecosystems. Additionally, limited interest from the industry to invest in providing hands-on training to the emerging talent further amplifies the challenges. To mitigate these challenges, India Pharma Inc. needs to support adequate funding and pull incentives to support the talent eager to work in the field of AMR. The industry and the government must come together to support antimicrobial stewardship programs while ensuring adequate resources, and robust research infrastructure to retain and nurture talent in the larger ecosystem. Government bodies like BIRAC should further intensify their schemes like Biotechnology Ignition Grant (BIG) or Small Business Innovation Research Initiative (SBIRI) to seed innovation and support long-term product development, and market access in AMR. Given the alacrity of challenge at hand, India must focus towards creating a robust pipeline or sustained funding ecosystem for retaining talent instrumental in pushing new breakthrough in antibiotic discovery. Ensuring that we have a workforce of trained research personnel will be crucial for research funding to go as far as possible and yield the most successful results to tackle AMR. This article is authored by Saransh Chaudhary, president, Global Critical Care, Venus Remedies Ltd and CEO, Venus Medicine Research Centre.
Time of India
5 days ago
- Time of India
Amdavadi scientist at Yale aims to combat AMR bacteria using viruses
Ahmedabad: Taking a cue from ancient wisdom – an enemy's enemy is a friend — an associate research scientist from Yale University, with his roots in the city, is working on improving the virus-bacteria interaction to use viruses known as bacteriophages to kill bacteria. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Dr Jyot Antani is part of the team that aims to further the science of targeting specific bacteria that have developed antimicrobial resistance (AMR) due to which the infection they cause cannot be treated with conventional antibiotics. The study, 'Microscopic Phage Adsorption Assay: High-throughput Quantification of Virus Particle Attachment to Host Bacterial Cells,' by Antani, Timothy Ward, Thierry Emonet, and Paul Turner from Yale University, was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal. "Like humans, bacteria can also be infected by viruses. They bind to the receptors on a bacterial host cell and replicate in a process identified as lytic replication, where the host's resources are used to create more phages. This causes the cell to rupture and die," explains Antani. Globally, these mechanisms are being reviewed as a potential way to address AMR bacterial infections through phage therapy. However, one roadblock is understanding this unique interaction at the microscopic level. The traditional method involves mixing bacteria and viruses in a flask and testing the mixture sample at regular intervals to measure the attachment of the phage (virus) on bacteria. It is time-consuming, labour-intensive and provides only an estimation, said researchers. Antani's team from the Yale Quantitative Biology Institute worked on the problem to develop the Microscopic Phage Adsorption (MPA) assay. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The published work indicates that the method quantifies the interaction between bacteria and phage at individual levels. "Using fluorescent dye, the phages appear as bright spots against the background of bacteria. Using this technique, researchers can record videos of the phages and bacteria in real time, documenting the dynamic movements and individual attachments of phages to bacteria," read the research summary on the Yale University website, Yale Scientific. Antani said that the breakthrough will help researchers understand the impact of different phage types on bacteria and develop strategies to combat bacteria. "If the sample shows a stable fluorescent dot (phage), it means that it got strongly attached to host bacteria. Phages bind to specific molecules (proteins or sugars) that stick out from the bacterial surface, like a ship docking into its assigned spot in the harbour," he said. "We tried many different species of each, including some notorious bacteria known for becoming resistant to antibiotics. Our approach successfully worked for most phages and bacteria that we tested." Antani's journey from Ahmedabad to New Haven has been inspiring. He studied in Gujarati medium until Class 12 before gaining admission to IIT Bombay where he pursued chemical engineering. He received a scholarship for his PhD at Texas A&M University, where he studied the movement of bacteria. "The Covid and post-Covid phases motivated me to explore the interaction between bacteria and viruses, and I got the postdoctoral opportunity at Yale University," he adds. "There are several interesting projects going on in India in this field, too."
