By Émer O’Toole, News Editor
The University will collaborate in a major European scheme to combat the global problem of antibiotic resistance- and urgent need for new drugs.
DRIVE-AB (Driving Reinvestment in R&D and Responsible Antibiotic Use) €9.4 million public-private corporation funded by the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative.
It aims to tackle the decreasing reserve of effective antibiotics, and to create, examine, and recommend new economic models for pharmaceutical industry investment in producing new ones.
Strathclyde’s crucial role in the initiative will involve examining the economic effects of antibiotic resistance from the viewpoints of patients, health care suppliers, and society.
Professor Alec Morton, of the Department of Management Science within Strathclyde Business School, said that the new partnership will “break down barriers, bringing expertise together from across borders and across disciplines, to further our understanding of the problem and find solutions.”
She continued: “One of our strengths as a business school is how we think about risks where there’s strategic uncertainty – this is significant as there a lot of things we don’t know about antibiotic resistance.”
DRIVE-AB’s collaborative project includes partners from 11 European countries from universities, research companies and pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. In the next three years, partners will produce and test new economic models for antiobotics.
Project leader, Stephan Harbarth, University of Geneva, said: “The dual crisis of antibiotic resistance and the near empty antibiotic pipeline pose a very real threat to human health.
Only collaboration on this scale, involving stakeholders worldwide will be sufficient to address the crisis.”
