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New £30m initiative to address global AMR threat
Innovate UK, LifeArc, and Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) have joined forces to create PACE (Pathways to Antimicrobial Clinical Efficacy), a £30 million initiative supporting early-stage innovation against antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to save lives. PACE has announced its first funding call with up to £10 million available to support innovators developing new antimicrobials. As the UK’s largest public-private initiative
targeting early-stage antimicrobial drug and diagnostic discovery, PACE will select, invest in and support projects that address the world’s most threatening pathogens. It will deliver innovations for onward development and investment, moving them closer to clinical trials. By tackling this problem collectively, with a pandemic-style focus, the early translational science community will be supported to deliver the breakthroughs needed. AMR is one of the top ten global health threats. By 2050, as many as ten million people could die each year as a result of AMR, more than the population of London. The economic impact is also vast. The World Bank predicts that from 2015 to 2050, the cost of AMR will be 3.5 billion USD per year on healthcare alone. AMR is complex. Bacteria and other microbes are
evolving to become resistant to treatment, driven in large part by our overuse and misuse of antibiotics. There are not enough current drugs, or drugs in development, to stay ahead of these resistant infections. Half of the antibiotics prescribed today were discovered in the 1950s, with only one new class discovered since the 1980s. There is an urgent need to grow a pipeline of new antimicrobial tests and treatments. New approaches are needed to combat AMR.
PACE will apply vital learning from other disease areas such as cancer and COVID-19, to the problem, where diagnosis and treatment have been transformed in recent years. It will provide wrap-around support for a diverse range of funded
projects with the most transformational potential - from targeted treatments to rapid diagnostics and other innovative developments being driven by the community. PACE is a collaboration between three leaders in the UK’s health innovation and research community. It harnesses their unique expertise - catalysing and working with the global AMR community to accelerate the speed of innovation to mitigate the risk of AMR. PACE will bring together the right funding, resources, and partnerships to help innovators progress their early-stage antimicrobial drug and diagnostics projects with greater speed, support and confidence – giving the best AMR innovations the greatest chance of success. Progress through PACE will mean our science community will be better supported, and the UK can contribute towards a more robust pipeline of tests and treatments, cementing its place as a global leader in life sciences, and ultimately contributing to better patient outcomes. Professor Dame Sally Davies, UK Special Envoy on
Antimicrobial Resistance, said: “I have always been clear that antimicrobial resistance is one the most severe global health threats that we face globally. Drug-resistant bacterial infections already kill 1.27 million people a year, and experts predict that AMR could kill over 10 million people a year as soon as 2050. I firmly believe that the development of new effective, affordable and equitably accessible antibiotics and rapid diagnostics is not just a medical necessity but a global imperative.”
UKHSA’s new infectious disease
data dashboard The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has launched the first iteration of its new dashboard, which will serve as a centralised source for infectious disease and outbreak data this winter, making it publicly available in a timely and transparent way. The dashboard will be updated on Thursday
each week. It will initially feature the latest information on a number of respiratory diseases, including: l COVID-19 l Influenza (flu) lRespiratory syncytial virus (RSV) lAdenovirus l Human metapneumovirus (hMPV) lParainfluenza lRhinovirus
Over time, the data dashboard will be expanded to provide additional health security data, including data relating to incidents of public interest. The new dashboard is still in development and builds on the success of the existing COVID-19 dashboard which, at the peak of the third lockdown, had a record 76.5 million hits in just 24 hours. The existing dashboard, developed at the
height of the pandemic to make information on the virus publicly available, will remain operational for now and should be considered the current data source for COVID-19. This product will be decommissioned in due course. High levels of influenza during winter 2022 to 2023 and outbreaks of a variety of infectious diseases highlighted the need for UKHSA to be alert to many health threats alongside COVID-19. This new dashboard will allow the agency to share vital data on common winter illnesses that can severely impact communities and health services each year.
Dedicated nursing team for catheter insertions can help reduce BSI
A new report published in the American Journal of Infection Control demonstrates that implementing a dedicated team of nurses to assist with central line insertions can reduce patients’ risk of developing bloodstream infections (BSI). In this report, infection preventionists based at UNC Health, in the US, found that having a dedicated team reduced the proportion of central line- associated BSI occurring within seven days of line placement by 47% among patients included in this
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www.clinicalservicesjournal.com I December 2023
improvement programme. Clinical guidelines offer specific protocols for ensuring proper insertion of a central line, but an internal study of UNC Health providers found that more than 80 percent of insertions did not follow all recommended practices. Infection preventionists and hospital leadership at UNC Health, aimed to improve patient outcomes by establishing a specialised nursing team dedicated to assisting with central line insertions.
The team was tasked with confirming compliance with a clinical checklist, observing and enabling infection-prevention techniques, and ensuring the availability of needed supplies for the procedure. Patricia Jackson, RN, BSN, MA, CIC, FAPIC, 2023
APIC president, commented. “The innovative approach described in this study
shows that adding trained observers to assist with the placement of central lines has tremendous potential to reduce infections and prevent harm.”
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