The Department of Health and Social Care is announcing the
launch of a £10 million research competition to fund
innovations to tackle antimicrobial resistance
(AMR) in
humans.
AMR, which
includes bacterial resistance to existing antibiotics, is
on the rise and poses a significant threat to health across
the world. Without a better understanding of how to tackle
and prevent AMR, treatable infections
could become life-threatening and the advancements made in
modern medicine over recent decades are at risk of being
reversed.
The competition follows the announcement of £30 million to fund
research and development projects as part of the
Global AMR Innovation Fund
(GAMRIF) in May 2018 with CARB-X, the Foundation for
Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), the Argentinian
government, and Canada’s International Development Research
Centre (IDRC).
The £10 million will be made available in research grants
funded through a Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI).
It is being run by Innovate UK on behalf of the Department
of Health and Social Care, with the aim of supporting the
implementation of the UK Five Year
Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy.
In 2016, a government-commissioned review by Lord Jim
O’Neill highlighted the need for more research and
development to reduce the global threat
of AMR –
prompting the government to commit to an additional
investment of up to £55 million over 5 years from 2016 to
2017 towards promoting excellence in AMR research and
development in the UK.
Today’s competition,
which makes available a maximum of £10 million in funding
to successful bids, forms part of funding announced in
October 2017 at the global ‘Call to Action’ conference by
the Wellcome Trust, the UN Foundation, and the UK, Ghanaian
and Thai governments, to accelerate action in this area.
Chief Medical Officer, , said:
Antimicrobial resistance may seem like a distant threat,
but people are already dying needlessly in their
thousands across the world, including in this country,
because they have a drug-resistant infection and we do
not have effective drugs to treat them. This problem is
only getting worse – we urgently need to find solutions.
More research is critical, which is why the UK government
is calling on some of the country’s brightest minds to
come up with new ways to prevent, control and combat
these infections in the future. I know there are exciting
projects needing support in this area – this competition
presents a fantastic opportunity for the UK to lead this
work.
