EU research alliance fights back against resistant super-bacteria

A significant health concern, bacterial infections kill about 100 Europeans every day as they increasingly become resistant to common antibiotic treatments. Researchers from the EU-industry co-funded COMBACTE-CARE research project collaborated with academics, hospitals, and laboratories across the EU to develop more effective solutions to address this major issue.

One of the biggest threats to global public health today is antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Some bacteria can double every 20 minutes in a lab setting and begin to become resistant to drugs within ten days! According to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, AMR is thought to be the cause of 35,000 deaths annually in the European Economic Area (EU nations plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway). There are concerns that this might increase to about 390,000 by 2050 if AMR is not addressed.

As clinical trials are conducted on individuals who have acute infections that require prompt treatment, evaluating new antibiotics clinically is very difficult. As a result, doctors have limited time to enroll patients in routine trials for new antibiotics. However, the newly developed clinical trial network, Ecraid (European Clinical Research Alliance on Infectious Diseases) may be able to overcome these time limits through a series of so-called 'perpetual observational studies'. These clinical studies gather information on bacterial infections in hospitals that are resistant to antibiotics and enroll patients continuously. Learn more.