Liverpool Business Festival features key discussions on AMR

Yesterday (Tuesday 26 June) saw the Liverpool Business Festival play host to the Health and Life Sciences sector and featured a selection of presentations from key opinion leaders, including Lord Jim O’Neill.

Lord O’Neill chaired the review on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and in his talk titled ‘How to keep drugs working in our connected world’ he discussed the progress (or lack thereof) seen around the issue of AMR.

“Of the ten areas of focus [for the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance] there has been a ridiculous amount of talk, but in terms of action, nothing,” he stressed. “There are many, many parts of the world where people have no idea about this challenge.

“The British government, even before our review finished, announced that they were starting the so-called Fleming Fund, which supports surveillance initiatives and systems in the emerging world. The chief medical officer of the UK, Sally Davis gets really annoyed with me when I say this, but it was great it was announced; it would be good if they got on and actually started delivering it.”

Continuing, Lord O’Neill had some particularly strong words for the pharmaceutical industry: “I have never heard a group of people talk about something as much as I have heard the pharmaceutical industry talk about antimicrobial resistance. What have any of them done since? Zip. It is time that they get off their distinguished backsides and put some skin in the game. Having come out of the financial crisis and seen what damage big multinationals can do, I say to them again here with people to listen — guess who’s going to get blamed if we don’t find a solution? And it’s the pharmaceutical world that needs to wake up more than others.”

“Of all the ten commandments we talk about, if there was only one you could emphasize as the most important, first of all I would say I cannot do that, because as I said earlier all ten are really necessary. But if the answer was only one, my answer is diagnostics.

“We need Google for doctors. We allow, encourage, force our doctors to guess if we need an antibiotic or not. It is ridiculous. We need to introduce state of the art technology right at the heart of our health system, here and all over the world to permanently reduce the excessive demand for antibiotics and to solve this problem, permanently, because even if we do get new drugs, it would only solve it for a generation until the antibodies become resistant to them as well.”

A panel discussion followed on from this talk to analyse whether or not we are truly facing an antibiotic apocalypse. For this Lord O’Neill was joined by Dr Janet Hemingway from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Dr Laura O’Brien, vice-president of operations for flu vaccine developer Seqirus, and Emmanuel Nsutebu, consultant in infectious diseases from the Royal Liverpool Hospital.

The question of whether an antibiotic apocalypse was imminent was posed to the whole panel.

“Ten million people dying a year will feel like an apocalypse for much of Africa and India and we may be scared of doing any international travel or business if we don’t do anything about it,” Lord O’Neill responded.

O’Brien from Seqirus said that each year half a million parents are demanding antibiotics for their children but ‘if they had been vaccinated against the virus, they probably wouldn’t be there’ in the first place.

Hemingway added: “We don’t want to find increased mortality from routine operations because we’re getting sepsis and infections from that surgery. But we need to act now and we must act collectively if we are going to stop that.”

Nsutebu was also asked whether governments and international health bodies should play a greater role in developing drugs. But he said: “We all have responsibility for this. Pharmaceutical companies have a key role to play [in drug development]. We need to be careful with antibiotic stewardship. We don’t want to see them used too widely because it makes things less profitable.”

The whole panel agreed that this could have knock-on effects for companies’ ability to fund further research and development.

However, the debate ended on an optimistic note, with panellists noting that the issue remained in the spotlight.

“We need to keep the momentum going,” summarised Hemingway. “As long as it’s on the political agenda, it will stay on pharmaceuticals’ agenda and the research agenda. It’s going to need continuous pressure to keep it there.”

EPM interviewed Lord O’Neill during the event, which will be featured on an upcoming MedTalk Podcast in the near future.