New GSK-backed venture targets drug-resistant superbugs with AI
Pharmaceutical group and Fleming Initiative launch project to combat antimicrobial resistance
Pharmaceutical company GSK is teaming up with UK scientists to use artificial intelligence to fight superbugs that are making life-saving medicines increasingly ineffective.
A £45mn venture with the Fleming Initiative will fund about 50 researchers and launch six programmes to target pathogens such as MRSA “hospital superbugs” and fungi that are spreading because of climate change, GSK will announce on Tuesday.
The project seeks to combat resistance to treatments such as antibiotics, which is growing due to overprescription, failures by patients to complete their courses and careless disposal of pharmaceuticals. Climate change and pollution are other risk factors, with flooding and microplastic surfaces giving pathogens the means to mix and exchange genetic material.
“It’s a global problem, it’s pretty indiscriminate and often described as the slow pandemic,” said Emma Walmsley, GSK’s chief executive, adding that there was a “very serious and significant impact” in poorer countries. “The statistics are surging and we’re hurtling towards 10mn deaths a year by 2050 unless there is material intervention.”
The development of new anti-microbial drugs has long been hampered by a lack of investment. Companies have often seen them as unprofitable compared with other types of pharmaceuticals, in part because they need to be used sparingly to avoid promoting fresh bouts of resistance.
UK drugmaker GSK won approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in March for Blujepa or gepotidacin, a drug to treat uncomplicated urinary tract infections in women and older girls. Companies such as Japan’s Shionogi and Roche of Switzerland are also active in the field.
One in six lab-confirmed bacterial infections globally is now resistant to antibiotic treatment, the World Health Organization warned in October. Drug-resistant microbes contributed to around 5mn deaths worldwide in 2021 and that number threatens to rise by more than two-thirds by 2050, according to a paper published in The Lancet last year.
Drug resistance — known as antimicrobial resistance, or AMR — emerges when pathogens mutate in ways that make treatments targeting them less effective. Since the new strains are more resilient to the medicines than their non-mutated counterparts, they are likelier to survive and multiply.
AMR tends to be most prevalent in low- and middle-income countries but the peril is global. Drug resistance has risen sharply in Ukraine because clinics are using antibiotics heavily to treat wounded from the war against Russia’s invasion.
One of the new projects aims to “set supercomputers versus the superbugs”, Walmsley said, using AI to make antibiotics target the tough defences of so-called Gram-negative bacteria. These include E. coli, responsible for intestinal and urinary tract illnesses, and Klebsiella pneumoniae, which can cause diseases including meningitis, pneumonia and blood infections.
A second project will use human volunteers to understand better methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a group of bacteria more commonly known as MRSA. These have historically been a leading cause of AMR-related deaths in healthcare facilities.
A third research strand will attempt to find new ways to attack Aspergillus species of fungus, some of which cause lethal infections and are thriving as rising global temperatures make more areas habitable for them.
Two other projects of the GSK-Fleming partnership will seek to improve antibiotic prescription and examine how analysis such as wastewater monitoring could help curb the spread of resistant microbes. The final one will look at potential policy changes, including to influence public use of anti-microbial drugs and incentivise companies to develop new ones.
The Fleming Initiative is a collaboration established by Imperial College London and its associated NHS trust to foster public-private efforts to tackle AMR. It is named for Sir Alexander Fleming, whose discovery of penicillin revolutionised the treatment of bacterial infections.