News
News
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.
News
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.
News
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.
News
Video: CIMAR Professors and Doctors Join Forces to Fight Superbugs
Drug-resistant diseases are hospitalizing and killing people across the world. To fight this crisis, researchers and physicians from Tufts University and Tufts Medical Center are bringing together their unique skillsets under one umbrella: The Tufts Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance.
News
Archaogen Bankruptcy Raises Worry Over Antibiotic Pipeline
We’re worried that Achaogen is not alone, and that we will see the fall of other small antibiotic manufacturers, said Helen Boucher, MD, director of the Tufts Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance and treasurer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). And we’re worried about the danger this could present for our patients.
News
Op-Ed: The Antibiotic Market is Broken and Won't Fix Itself
Over the past year we’ve watched two troubling trends escalate. First, patients increasingly face — and their doctors struggle to treat — infections that do not respond to existing antibiotics. Second, major pharmaceutical companies are backing away from developing new antibiotics.
News
Stopping Cholera in Its Tracks: Testing Bacteriophages as a Way to Halt the Spread of the Deadly Disease
Cholera strikes almost 3 million people each year worldwide. Tufts/CIMAR researchers are developing a treatment to prevent its spread, using viruses to attack the bacterium that causes the disease.
News
Antimicrobial Resistance Fighters: CIMAR is cracking down on one of the biggest global health concerns
Antimicrobial resistance is a global catastrophe, leading to 700,000 deaths annually around the world. Tufts University and Tufts Medical Center are heeding the call with the new Tufts Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance (CIMAR)…
News
Tufts-Led Study Compares Gender-Specific Expression of Antibiotic Resistance Genes During Active Gonorrhea Infection
The World Health Organization estimates that 78 million people worldwide are infected with gonorrhea each year…
Events, News
Metabolic Modeling Predicts Unique Drug Targets in Lyme Disease Pathogen B. burgdorferi – TUSM’s Peter Gwynne, PhD
We were pleased to hear from Bryan Lenneman, Ph.D., today on “Engineering Phages as Novel Antimicrobials Targeting Gram-Negative Pathogens.” Dr. Lenneman is a Research Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital whose research interests include utilizing synthetic biology to develop novel therapeutics against diseases associated with dysbiosis of the human gut microbial community.
Events, News
Drug-Resistant Superbugs: CIMAR Symposium Examines the Intersection of People, Animals, Food, and the Environment, and Their Impact on Health
The Tufts Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance (CIMAR) held its first symposium in Boston on March 18th. The event brought together over 175 clinicians and researchers from academia, medicine, and industry, all interested in fighting drug-resistant diseases via a “One Health” approach. One Health prioritizes the relationship among people, animals, the environment, and the foods we all consume as critical avenues by which drug-resistant bacteria spread from one to another