Thanks for your comment. Yes! The recent disability-adjusted life-years projection for drug resistance just released showed a total of 4·95 million deaths associated with bacterial AMR in 2019, including 1·27 million deaths attributable to bacterial AMR. At the regional level, we estimated the all-age death rate attributable to resistance to be highest in western sub-Saharan Africa, at 27·3 deaths per 100 000 . Six pathogens contributed to the largest burden of AMR in 2019 (E coli, S aureus, K pneumoniae, S pneumoniae, A baumannii, and P aeruginosa) have been identified as priority pathogens by WHO. My goal is to isolate, characterize and have ready-for-use phage products in the store for use against these pathogens in Nigeria.
This is also important to the global community, because of the exchange of phages. For example, in Dhanvi’s story, a 7-year-old girl is scheduled for amputation as a result of drug resistance. The Australian group reached out to the global community for help with phages that is specific for the bacteria infecting Dhanvi, this was found in Israel and coincidentally had sent the phages to the US for use. The phage was used to save her legs.
Aside from quantifying how much you could achieve with extra funding, it might be worth thinking about what might make this work even more exciting from either an impact or cost-effectiveness perspective. For example—would this phage technology be used against a novel engineered virus? How quickly would a lab be able to create a ready-for-use a therapeutic phage product to a completely new virus in a pandemic setting, if at all possible? This would expand your possible intervention audience from [anyone affected by a resistant organism] to [anyone in the future who could be affected by a major pandemic].
On the other hand, it’s also useful to think about what might make this work even less exciting from an impact / cost-effectiveness perspective. Why doesn’t this technology already exist in the context you’re in? What are some barriers in making this happen? Are there better alternatives that exist for AMR / fungal infections? One example that comes to mind is—what would be a reason hospitals would prefer a phage-based cleaning product for cleaning hospital environments over say, bleach / other disinfectants that are currently being used?
That being said, I think EA objectives of trying to quantify impact and be as cost effective as we can be are ideas that should be useful even for cause areas that don’t currently hit various organisations’ funding bars. I’m happy to briefly look over a proposal and give fairly general feedback from my understanding of an EA lens (though I neither have expertise in phages nor a deep understanding of how the funding process works) - feel free to DM me if you think this would be useful, otherwise all the best!
Thanks for your comment. Yes! The recent disability-adjusted life-years projection for drug resistance just released showed a total of 4·95 million deaths associated with bacterial AMR in 2019, including 1·27 million deaths attributable to bacterial AMR. At the regional level, we estimated the all-age death rate attributable to resistance to be highest in western sub-Saharan Africa, at 27·3 deaths per 100 000 . Six pathogens contributed to the largest burden of AMR in 2019 (E coli, S aureus, K pneumoniae, S pneumoniae, A baumannii, and P aeruginosa) have been identified as priority pathogens by WHO. My goal is to isolate, characterize and have ready-for-use phage products in the store for use against these pathogens in Nigeria.
This is also important to the global community, because of the exchange of phages. For example, in Dhanvi’s story, a 7-year-old girl is scheduled for amputation as a result of drug resistance. The Australian group reached out to the global community for help with phages that is specific for the bacteria infecting Dhanvi, this was found in Israel and coincidentally had sent the phages to the US for use. The phage was used to save her legs.
Aside from quantifying how much you could achieve with extra funding, it might be worth thinking about what might make this work even more exciting from either an impact or cost-effectiveness perspective. For example—would this phage technology be used against a novel engineered virus? How quickly would a lab be able to create a ready-for-use a therapeutic phage product to a completely new virus in a pandemic setting, if at all possible? This would expand your possible intervention audience from [anyone affected by a resistant organism] to [anyone in the future who could be affected by a major pandemic].
On the other hand, it’s also useful to think about what might make this work even less exciting from an impact / cost-effectiveness perspective. Why doesn’t this technology already exist in the context you’re in? What are some barriers in making this happen? Are there better alternatives that exist for AMR / fungal infections? One example that comes to mind is—what would be a reason hospitals would prefer a phage-based cleaning product for cleaning hospital environments over say, bleach / other disinfectants that are currently being used?
That being said, I think EA objectives of trying to quantify impact and be as cost effective as we can be are ideas that should be useful even for cause areas that don’t currently hit various organisations’ funding bars. I’m happy to briefly look over a proposal and give fairly general feedback from my understanding of an EA lens (though I neither have expertise in phages nor a deep understanding of how the funding process works) - feel free to DM me if you think this would be useful, otherwise all the best!