Funding for antibacterial resistance research. Not so much.

At least no funding for ESCKAPE pathogen research

I just got back from attending the World HAI Forum in Annecy and the 1st ICPIC meeting in Geneva.  Both great meetings.  I will share my thoughts on the implications of ICPIC in a later post.

Last year at IDSA, Roy (Trip) Gulick stated that there are now 10,000 possible ART combinations for HIV treatment.  When he said that, I instantly got a sinking feeling in my gut.  Right now, there are many people colonized and infected with resistant bacteria for which we have NO EFFECTIVE THERAPY.  Sorry for shouting.  Think about the MDR-Acinetobacter or NDM-1 strains that are circulating.  Pretty soon we won't even have effective therapy for community UTIs.

As I thought about why this might be, I looked for the federal funding picture for antibacterial resistance research, but there were no published data.  So, we found the numbers ourselves.  I presented the data last week and Marin McKenna kindly described our findings at the World HAI Forum on her Wired Superbug blog.  She did a much better job describing our research findings than I could have.  If you're interested in reading about how much NIH/NIAID spends on antibacterial resistance research, head on over to her blog...

UPDATE:  We published these findings in the first batch of articles in the ARIC journal, see: Kwon et al. 2012 ARIC