The 5 Year Plan

We turned our attention to the strategies that the UK government was adopting to tackle antibiotic resistance (as this is the country we are working in). We discovered the AMR five year strategy. The AMR five year strategy was developed in collaboration with a whole host of organisations from the Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to the National Health Service and the Ministry of Defence. Together, these organisations set out a number of action points for seeing a reduction in antibiotic resistance over the next 5 years from 2013.

In their report they put these points as targets:

1. Good infection prevention and control measures to help prevent infections occurring become the norm in all sectors of human and animal health
2. Infections can be diagnosed quickly and the right treatment used
3. Patients and animal keepers fully understand the importance of antibiotic treatment regimens and adhere to them
4. Surveillance is in place which quickly identifies new threats or changing patterns in resistance
5. There is a sustainable supply of new, effective antimicrobials

Again, of importance is the fact that the UK are calling for quick diagnosis of infections, this validates the importance of our device for the UK.

The Rapid Diagnostics Steering Committee Interview

We spoke to David Oglesby, a Clinical Fellow and member of the Rapid Diagnostics Steering Committee set up to survey implementation of the UK government AMR five year strategy plan in the area of rapid diagnostics.

We know the world governments, including the UK is calling for a device like ours. But we are interested in finding out more specifically what kind of a device they are looking for. The following is some of the highlights of the interview.

Our device is limited to the extent that it would not be able to tell which antibiotics are needed to treat a certain disease. It would only be able to detect if there is a bacterial or a lack of bacterial infection. Would you say this is too simplistic of a device?

“Absolutely not. When you look at the reports around that say where antibiotic resistance is coming from... one of the biggest areas you still find is that people giving antibiotics that have viral infections…

The biggest issues of this, say an infection like meningitis, is that when you tell a child and the parents I’m not going to give you antibiotics is a huge emotive issue. There is some clinical value in being able to calm the parents down and that is a big general item. It does need to be looked at.”

Like all devices, it is difficult to achieve 100% accuracy. How accurate would you say our device need to be?

“It’s all gonna come down to being accurate enough to give the doctors the confidence in using the results. It’s got to be in the high 80s and possibly late 90s... because antibiotics are still relatively cheap and they are easy to prescribe, there are no real barriers to stop the prescription. If you don't’ them the confidence,they are not really going to use it (the device).”

From our discussions and research we developed a network of governmental and non-governmental, international and non-international organisations that are pushing for discussion and action. We called this group The Talk.

The Legend

The World Health Organisation (WHO) are a division of the UN who carry out research on health issues globally and produce recommendations for governments to implement in an effort to improve people’s health worldwide.

The UK government has recently made antibiotic resistance one of the top problems facing the UK, an important step in tackling antibiotic resistance.

The Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) steering group was one of a number of steering groups established after talks between a number of governmental and NHS bodies, including Public Health England, NHS England, the Department for Health, created strategies for tackling antimicrobial resistance in 2013. The steering group monitors the progress of the strategies and reports back to governmental and NHS bodies.

As academics iGEM fits into our network here. It provides young people with a platform to learn more about current problems and come up with creative solutions through synthetic biology and engineering, this paves the way for next generation to be active in tackling problems like antibiotic resistance. Academics at college and university institutions are also looking at the problem of antibiotic resistance.

Industry, specifically the pharmaceutical industry have been reducing research into antibiotics and antibiotic resistance in recent years as it is no longer a lucrative activity for them.

NHS management sets targets for hospitals and GP surgeries to abide by. These goals include antibiotic prescription rates. Hospitals can be fined for exceeding these goals.

Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) is a governing body for all vets in the UK. They set standards for good veterinary practice and monitor practice including antibiotic usage.