Conflict With the Resistance
THE ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE
The Pioneers and Contributors Towards Antimicrobial Resistance
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized organization that is concerned with and promotes international health. However, it mainly works within the United Nations. The organization aims to provide information about health-related issues and spread awareness about public health.
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WHO also aims to decrease the spread of antibiotic resistance by educating the general public on prevention methods as well as encourage the best practices. On May 2015, the World Health Assembly endorsed a global action plan to combat antimicrobial resistance using five strategic objectives.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is an organization that mainly funds and conducts research on infectious diseases, including antimicrobial resistance. It makes active efforts to support researchers and companies in their attempts to treat as well as prevent resistant infectious diseases. The organization have partnered up with other research groups that are working to develop new drugs or vaccines and find new strategies to use existing drugs in order to combat resistance. Also, NIAID works towards a faster diagnosis rate for an easier way for doctors to prescribe effective drugs. This limits the overuse of broad-spectrum drugs and decreases the chance of microbes developing resistance towards the drugs.
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Check out their recent research initiatives on antimicrobial resistance.
In 2018, Dr. David Dulin and his team at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) along with a team led by Achillefs Kapanidis at the University of Oxford have discovered a point in the production process of proteins that can be manipulated by bacteria. This could be used as a starting point for developing new antibiotics to overcome current resistance to other existing drugs.
A large protein complex called RNA polymerase (RNAP) produces RNA in bacteria by reading the DNA sequence and building a copy of RNA through joining nucleotides together. While the production of RNA has been a subject of research for developing antibiotics for infections like tuberculosis, these teams of scientists focused on how the production RNA is regulated in the early stages since it was unknown how it occurred. Using high-end fluorescence microscopy, the researchers found that during the initial RNA synthesis, a certain sequence of DNA forces the RNAP to pause.
"[I]t may be possible to develop medication that locks the RNAP in the paused state, thus killing the bacteria that cause illnesses," says Dr. Dulin.
The Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) has been a leading global non-governmental organization fighting to strengthen global defenses against infectious diseases and to preserve the effectiveness of drugs since 1981. With a network of 16 affiliated countries, APUA has been striving towards building local microbiology surveillance and diagnosis capacity with the addition of improving institutional and governmental antimicrobial policy.
The organization partners up with other research groups in projects to spread awareness through educational activities designed to promote proper antibiotic usage. They provide technical assistance and small research grants to developing countries; like Vietnam, Uruguay, Peru, Nepal, and Ukraine; as part of their global efforts to "preserve the power of antibiotics."
The Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics is an organization centered in the EU, comprising of 63 supporting members representing more than 500 organizations. With more than 400,000 Americans getting sick from infections caused by antibiotic-resistant foodborne bacteria and many more worldwide, their main focus is in antibiotic misuse in livestock farming, and how to reduce it. The Alliance works with farmers, food businesses, retailers, academics, policy makers and health organizations in an effort to reduce farm antibiotic use by 50% by 2020 and 80% by 2050 across the EU.
A report shows that farm antibiotic use is the main source of resistant human infections like salmonella. Presented with this information, the Alliance is calling on the UK government, food retailers, and European policy markers to take urgent actions to prevent drug misuse and further human infections. These actions include banning the routine use of drugs in entirely healthy animals, isolating the use of 'critically important' antibiotics (CIAs) to a last resort drug, and include measures aimed at improving animal health and welfare in all antibiotic reduction strategies.
The AmpliPhi Biosciences Corporation is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on the development of bacteriophage-based therapies as treatment for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. AmpliPhi Biosciences are one of the leading companies in revisiting and researching phage therapies as a possible solution to treating antibiotic resistance. Their goal is to identify and develop specific types of Bacteriophages, which have evolved to target specific strains of bacteria, that can single out resistant bacteria, and restore antibiotic sensitivity to it.
In 2017, AmpliPhi announced the first human administration of their therapeutic drug candidate AB-SA01 as an attempt to treat a patient infected with Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), a group of bacteria that causes common infections like pneumonia. The patient was also in a life-threatening situation as S. aeruginosa also causes infections that are resistant to nearly all types of antibiotics. Multiple doses of AB-SA01 were given through the veins over the course of two weeks, and the treatment ended with good results.
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