White House launches five-year plan to counter antibiotic resistance

The United States government has announced a five-year plan to fight the antibiotic-resistant bacteria crisis.

The White House has said that the plan involves speeding up research and development by streamlining the process, and aiming to increase the number of candidate drugs throughout the pipeline. The plan builds on the President’s 2016 Budget released earlier this year, which proposed nearly doubling the amount of Federal funding for combating and preventing antibiotic resistance to more than $1.2 billion. The new plan proposes to improve international collaboration and capacities, and be “smarter” around prescribing practices in humans and animals.

Specific goals include advancing at least two new antibiotic drugs or vaccines from preclinical testing to clinical trials by 2020. It also proposes to create a biopharma consortium to help promote the number of antibiotics and antibodies in the pipeline. It aims to strengthen the national "One-Health" surveillance efforts in antibiotics by integrating data from multiple monitoring networks, and by providing detailed genomic data and other information necessary to tracking resistant bacteria. The proposals also include improving the development and use of rapid diagnostic testing, which would allow health care providers to distinguish between viral and bacterial infections, and identify bacterial drug susceptibilities in one health care visit.