World Antibiotics Awareness Week

The week of 13 -19 November 2017 is World Antibiotic Awareness Week!

The World Antibiotic Awareness Week is an initiative of the WHO to spread awareness on risks and prevention of antibiotic resistance. For this occasion, an expert panel from the European Academy of Microbiology (EAM) discusses what the future holds for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and what can be done to actively tackle it.

Oscar Kuipers, Program Director of Center for Sustainable Antimicrobials (CeSAM) from the University of Groningen, explains: “AMR will be a very persistent problem. Pathogenic bacteria will always find a way to outsmart us and will develop resistance to every new drug we’ll create. This sounds like bad news and in a sense it is. But we can tackle the problem by taking several measures, including good stewardship, good and fast diagnostics, but above all by continuously applying novel concepts in drug development.

We have too long been satisfied by directly mining nature and using chemical modification of existing antibiotics. We now need to be more creative and apply novel methods in screening and eliciting production of natural products, but also by using new scaffolds and templates for chemical- and bioengineering, new administration methods and other ways of regulating their bioactivity. In this way, we can keep on refueling the pipeline of novel lead molecules to be taken into drug development programs, and be safe in the future against ever occurring highly resistant pathogenic strains.”

The complete article with several AMR expert interviews can be read at https://fems-microbiology.org/ask-experts-future-hold-amr/

More information about antibiotic resistance and the World Antibiotic Awareness Week is available at http://www.who.int/campaigns/world-antibiotic-awareness-week/en/