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IDSA Describes AMR Challenges, Answers in Congressional Testimony
The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) treasurer Dr. Helen Boucher, FIDSA, has urged lawmakers to support and expand federal efforts to stabilize the antibiotic market, spur the development of new infection-fighting drugs and protect existing ones in testimony before House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on National Security.
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Antibiotic Resistance Plays a Role in Biodefense
The House Oversight subcommittee on national security convened experts last week to discuss biodefense — and the focus was on the threat of antimicrobial resistance. A bug doesn’t have to be a weapon to be deadly. We have the sad duty of sending people to hospice because we don’t know how to treat their infections, CIMAR’s Dr. Helen Boucher told the panel.
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Experts Warn of Antimicrobial Resistance, Additional Threats to National Biosecurity
“Antibiotic infections pose serious threats to our national security,” said Dr. Helen Boucher, director of the Tufts Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance at Tufts University. “Resistant pathogens complicate our soldiers’ combat wounds, increasing risk of limb loss and death, and compromise our military combat readiness and effectiveness.”
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CIMAR Epidemiologist Maya Nadimpalli, PhD, Describes Efforts to Document Antibiotic Resistance in Developing Countries
As an epidemiology postdoc at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Maya Nadimpalli became interested in antibiotic resistance among young children in low-income countries. Now at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, Nadimpalli shares the opportunities and challenges of studying public health in developing nations in this Nature Careers Q&A.
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CIMAR’s Yoav Golan, MD, on the Recent Approval of Ceftolozane/Tazobactam for HABP/VABP
The FDA has approved a new indication for Merck’s ceftolozane/tazobactam (Zerbaxa), allowing for the drug to be used to treat hospital-acquired bacterial pneumonia and ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia. Contagion® spoke with CIMAR’s Yoav Golan, MD, attending physician and associate professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, about what this could mean for patients.
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Phage Therapy to Prevent Cholera Infections and Possibly Those Caused by Other Deadly Bacteria
In the latest of a string of high-profile cases in the U.S., a cocktail of bacteria-killing viruses successfully treated a cystic fibrosis patient suffering from a deadly infection caused by a pathogen that was resistant to multiple forms of antibiotics. Curing infections is great, of course. But what about using these bacteria-killing viruses to prevent infections in the first place?
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Joining Forces for Good: Tufts CIMAR and the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute Encourage Multidisciplinary Collaboration.
CIMAR and CTSI are just two of the exciting initiatives that embody Tufts’ commitment to enhancing multi-disciplinary collaboration. Each brings together investigators and clinicians from across the medical school, the university, and Tufts Medical Center to solve pressing real-world problems with a One Health approach.
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The Death of Antibiotics: We’re Running Out of Effective Drugs to Fight Off an Army of Superbugs
“We’re seeing healthy young people with urinary tract and skin infections that we don’t have a pill for,” says Helen Boucher, an infectious disease specialist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. “And we may not be able to perform organ transplants, and even routine surgeries like joint replacements. We should all be scared.”
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Predicting TB’s Course: CIMAR’s Gillian Beamer Hopes to Unlock Why the Bacterium Affects Individuals Differently
Beamer plans to identify and test both proteins in blood and lung tissue that accurately determine disease categories and DNA sequences on chromosomes that accurately correlate with these disease outcomes. “Our goal is to generate testable models that can predict the outcome of infection before disease occurs,” Beamer said.
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Doctors Are Running Out of Effective Drugs Because of Poor Financial Incentives to Develop Them
Medical researchers have known for decades that the pipeline for new drugs to stave off bacterial infections would one day run dry. That day is now at hand. “The crisis has already arrived. We are in an era now when doctors like me have no effective antibiotics for some of their patients,” says CIMAR Director Dr. Helen Boucher.
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Antibiotics Aren’t Profitable Enough for Big Pharma to Make More
Public health experts are calling for new incentives to reward companies for bringing drugs that are effective against resistant strains to market. Achaogen Inc. spent 15 years racing to develop antibiotics against resistant superbugs such as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, a strain that can kill up to half the people it attacks. But as a business, it’s a failure. The drug, Zemdri, lacked sales in its first six months on the market == less than $1 million. Achaogen filed for bankruptcy in April.
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Medicare Payment Rules Hinder the Fight Against Superbugs
Late last year, a retirement community in Vermont was quarantined after an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria swept through the facility, sickening 70 seniors. In pediatric oncology wards, children beating cancer are increasingly felled by drug-resistant bacteria and fungal infections. Every week, we hear more stories of infections that have become untreatable due to resistance. Such alarms, once rare, are becoming more commonplace. The time to fix the problem is now, before it’s too late.