I am the Co-Founder and Director of ARMoR, a Charity Entrepreneurship incubated charity working on tackling the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance. We work on securing a sustainable pipeline of new, effective antimicrobials and improving access to those with the greatest need.
Prior to founding ARMoR, I spent 5 excellent years working in various roles for AstraZeneca. I am chemist and chemical engineer by background with a Masters from the University of Strathclyde.
Thanks for the comment, ensuring better stewardship, especially in countries such as India, is definitely a really important part of combating AMR but it’s not something we’re planning to work on directly in the near term. The main reason for this is that as a small organisation we want to keep a narrow focus on what we think will be the most tractable option for us to have a big impact. Development of new antimicrobials seems to be a good option for this as they will always be needed, regardless of improvements to stewardship and given the lag from a policy passing to us actually seeing high-value antimicrobials on the market is likely to be at least 10 years, this felt extremely pressing to us.
We also think that new antimicrobials will play an important role in supporting stewardship and we’re particularly interested in policies that can enable this. The policies we support would reduce the incentives for pharmaceutical companies to make money through sales as you’ve mentioned, although, they don’t fully tackle the overprescribing or misprescribing issue. Additionally, more specific antimicrobials combined with better diagnostics should also help in reducing this issue.