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Lab Science Investigations (LSI) is a two-week hands-on summer research experience at Tufts for high school students. It’s also an interdisciplinary program that raises awareness of the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a partnership between centers and schools across Tufts, and a collaborative learning group of people of different ages, academic levels, experiences, cultures, and perspectives. Best of all, it’s a lot of fun. Nicole Ma, a junior at North Quincy High School, attended LSI this summer. She said she would highly recommend the program to other science-interested high schoolers. “I would tell them, definitely go,” she said. “It’s a great experience. You’ll learn a lot and you’ll probably miss it when it’s over.”

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Joined by leaders of global organisations including the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and the World Bank as well as pressure groups and civil society organisations, these premiers are in New York to address a single theme – antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The main goal will be the agreement of a political declaration, developed over the past months, which sets out the scope of the AMR challenge, not only for human health but also for animals and plants, and the consequences for equitable global development, the economy, food safety and security.

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Following instructions provided by a patient insert can also help combat antimicrobial resistance—when antimicrobial drugs become ineffective to treat pathogens like fungi or bacteria. To prevent antimicrobial resistance as a consumer, make sure to take antibiotic medications only when they’ve been prescribed to you. “Don’t take the drugs that have been prescribed for your family members, or give drugs prescribed for one child to another,” Beninger said. Ensure that you complete a course of antibiotics that has been prescribed—even if you’re feeling better.

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Widespread antibiotic prescribing contributes to globally emerging antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Despite stewardship recommendations by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, there is a lack of literature identifying barriers and facilitators to antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) in United States (U.S.) carceral settings. People with criminal-legal experience—a term used to describe persons who are either currently incarcerated or have been incarcerated—are at increased risk for several infectious diseases (e.g., methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), pneumococcal disease, meningococcus). Two former CIMAR Summer Scholars and several CIMAR members contributed to this publication.

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NEJM presents an interview with Dr. Revati Masilamani, Program Lead for CIMAR’s Laboratory Science Investigations summer course for high schoolers, on a multitiered mentoring program aimed at supporting pathways to biomedical careers for students from diverse backgrounds. Tufts’ STEM+M Connect program uses multitiered near-peer mentoring to help students navigate key academic transition points by building career awareness, a sense of belonging, and social networks.

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This K12 award will be used to develop a novel combination antimicrobial susceptibility testing method for Mycobacterium abscessus, a pathogen that has been described as “antibiotic nightmare”. Infections caused by this organism require 12-18 months of combination treatment with 4-6 antibiotics; patients suffer from significant drug toxicity and are often unable to complete treatment. However, there are no validated clinical assays to determine if drug combinations are synergistic or antagonistic. Synergistic combinations will allow the use of shorter, more effective, and less toxic treatment regimens. Working under the mentorship of CIMAR Associate Director and Professor Bree Aldridge, PhD, at TUSM, this project will adapt the DiaMOND assay used for pre-clinical and animal studies of novel tuberculosis drugs to develop a novel diagnostic assay for patient care using clinical microbiology protocols, clinical strains, and clinically relevant drugs.

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Kevin Outterson, a professor of health law, ethics and human rights at Boston University, spoke at The Fletcher School’s annual Dr. Maurice S. Segal Lecture on Feb. 29. Outterson’s talk, titled “The Social Ecology of Antimicrobial Resistance,” focused on the science, economics and accessibility of antimicrobial medicines. A longtime friend of the Levy CIMAR, Outterson is also the founding executive director and principal investigator of Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator, or CARB-X, a global nonprofit partnership whose mission is to accelerate the development of antibiotics, vaccines and other products that fight against lethal bacteria that have grown resistant to the current circulation of antibacterial products.

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UC San Diego’s Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir, PharmD, MPH, AAHIVP presented on “The Intersection of Racism, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Vaccine Equity” for a Black History Month seminar, focusing on healthcare disparities observed across racially and ethnically minoritized groups. The talk was sponsored jointly by the Levy CIMAR, the Tufts Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion committee, and the Tufts Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Abdul-Mutakabbir is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacy at UC San Diego’s Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and in the Division of the Black Diaspora and African American Studies.

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One of the things that sets silk apart as a material is how benign it is. The liquid mixture the researchers start with is essentially just silk fibroin (the core protein in silk) and water—it’s nontoxic and chemically neutral. That means it’s easy to add bioactive molecules such as antibiotics or enzymes. Moreover, silk is remarkably good at stabilizing those molecules and keeping them from degrading. For example, the researchers found that blood samples mixed and dried with silk fibroin remained stable at high temperatures for multiple months. They have had similar findings with vaccines—another spinout company, Vaxess, is currently working to develop silk-based vaccine patches for wide-scale use.

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Researchers at the National Institutes of Health recently outlined strategies to tackle President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, which aims to cut cancer deaths in half over the next 25 years. They made one glaring omission: a plan to combat drug-resistant superbugs. The two public health crises — cancer and drug-resistant infections — are deeply intertwined. Patients with cancer are three times more likely to die of an infection than patients without the disease. Unless we quickly mobilize to fight superbugs, the Cancer Moonshot will never achieve liftoff.

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The world’s population is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, and healthcare institutions are sounding the alarm that inaction could result in a breakdown of healthcare systems worldwide within the next 30 years. In 2021, the World Health Organization named antimicrobial resistance as one of the top 10 emerging threats to global health, but lawmakers in the United States have been unable to pass legislation to address the crisis. Levy CIMAR Founding Director and Dean of Tufts School of Medicine, Helen Boucher, MD, spoke on the urgency for Congress to address AMR seriously. She said, \u0022this is a game where there needs to be planning in advance for the threats we know and some we don’t know.\u0022