Global fight intensifies against superbug ‘menace’

A surge in funding is set to boost the global battle against drug-resistant superbugs, with the UK government and pharmaceutical company GSK committing a total of £130mn to tackle growing antimicrobial resistance.

The pledges will be made at an international meeting of ministers and health experts on Thursday in London, where participants will present the case for stronger action and increased funding against superbugs ahead of a UN conference on antimicrobial resistance in September.

Evolution drives microbes — bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites — to develop mechanisms to protect themselves from the treatments designed to kill them and prevent disease. Excessive or inappropriate use of these drugs, in medicine and agriculture, has accelerated the process in recent decades.

“The global antibiotic emergency is an existential threat to communities everywhere,” said Dame Sally Davies, the UK special envoy on AMR who will host the event. “This menace is deeply unfair, with the burden disproportionately falling on the world’s most vulnerable — in low- and middle-income countries and also on children.”

The funding — £85mn from the UK government and £45mn from GSK — is not aimed at developing new antibiotics, which is covered by other programmes. It is intended primarily to improve access to existing drugs and make sure they are used more effectively, especially in poorer countries, so that microbes are less likely to evolve resistance.

Emma Walmsley, GSK chief executive, told the Financial Times that, having just returned from a visit to Africa, she was “struck by how high AMR is on the agenda there”.

“The challenge is related not only to innovation but also to the resilience of health systems, so they can effectively diagnose infections and make sure prescribed courses of antibiotics are completed by patients,” she said.

“Just like climate change, it is often the most vulnerable communities that are exposed here.”

GSK will become the first founding partner of the Fleming Initiative, a new global network based at St Mary’s Hospital in London where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. It will help to increase surveillance of drug-resistant bacteria, using artificial intelligence to analyse complex scientific data, and focus on improving diagnosis so that the right antibiotics are given to patients who need them.

Another initiative, funded by a £10mn contribution from the UK in partnership with Saudi Arabia, will set up a global independent panel for AMR.

“This will be modelled on other expert panels such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” said Davies. “We need an independent scientific body to assess the evidence on antibiotic resistance and help set targets.”

Updated indications of AMR’s impact on global health and economic activity will also be unveiled at the London conference. Estimates published in Lord Jim O’Neill’s 2016 AMR review for the UK government are still cited around the world to illustrate the potential scale of the problem — particularly the prediction that on current trends AMR will kill 10mn people a year and cost the global economy a cumulative $100tn by 2050.

Those figures were now predicted to be overestimates, according to preliminary unpublished results of separate studies led by Anthony McDonnell of the Center for Global Development in Washington and Christopher Murray of the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

According to Murray, deaths directly attributable to AMR might reach 2mn a year by 2050 from current rates of 1.25mn. “That is similar to the effect we expect to see from climate change,” he said.

But a reduction in the estimated impact of AMR was no reason to let up on the fight against superbugs, said McDonnell: “The return from stopping AMR will be far greater than the cost of the investment.”