The Department of Health and Social Care has announced the launch of £10 million research competition to fund innovations to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in humans and to encourage the development of innovative scientific approaches to stopping antimicrobial resistance and to infection control and prevention.
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.
Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies 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.”
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).
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.
