News – Blog
8 March 2022
Through running the Longitude Prize, we at Challenge Works have immersed ourselves in the world of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). In doing so, we have gained extensive knowledge about the AMR diagnostic market for innovators internationally and the recurring challenges they face.
One of these challenges is the lack of strategic government purchasing to drive innovation for needed diagnostics. In order to produce effective products, innovators, developers and manufacturers must be convinced that there is a viable market for the products they are developing. This ‘market shaping’ worked well during the COVID crisis. In the case of COVID, there were product development grants but more importantly governments committed to purchasing products if they met certain specifications.
The COVID pandemic also highlighted just how valuable rapid diagnostic tests are to both individuals and society, and showed how powerful target product profiles and advance market commitments can be to incentivise innovation.
FIND, the global alliance for diagnostics in Geneva, were tasked with evaluating new COVID tests worldwide and to date have analysed and shared information on over 120 tests. Despite this, the momentum gathered to ensure the ready availability of diagnostic products to battle COVID, the key government measures are not yet being replicated to tackle the growing resistance to antibiotics. The right steers and support to innovators would mean that diagnostic tests could be speeded to market. The technology is there, it is the market conditions that are lacking.
AMR is a growing global pandemic. The new Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) study in the Lancet found that AMR now poses a major threat to human health worldwide, and more than 1.2 million people died as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections in 2019.
In low and middle income countries (LMICs) especially, lack of access to antibiotics and diagnostics have been drivers of high death rates from AMR. In a Lancet Global Health Viewpoint, Professor Sabiha Essack analysed South African trends in both antibiotic resistance and antibiotic use in South Africa, and found a significant rise in use of last resort antibiotics over a five-year period. This highlights the need for better diagnostics to steer antibiotic use and the need to create procurement mechanisms so that the right diagnostics and antibiotics are available when and where they are needed.
Through our work on the Longitude Prize, our aim is to incentivise the development of diagnostic products that will enable reduced, more considered and accurate use of antibiotics. The winner of the Prize will receive an £8 million payout to further develop their solution and help tackle the global challenge of antibiotic resistance.
Aside from the upfront innovation of these products, there is a need to shape the market for these products. We have seen first-hand that innovators are stymied by the lack of viable lower and middle-income country (LMIC) markets for innovative diagnostics. A potential solution for this is a Netflix-like subscription model, which would serve to create the required predictability for essential antibiotics and diagnostics in LMIC markets. We explore this concept in more detail in the Lancet Global Health Viewpoint article.
Around the world, governments are not reacting to the AMR crisis with enough urgency. There is a critical need for a fast, focused and coordinated response that will facilitate the development of the diagnostic tools that will steer more responsible antibiotic use worldwide.
We know this can be done. For the COVID pandemic, the WHO’s Emergency Use Listing (EUL) procedure was used to assess, finance and develop diagnostic products to stem the emergency. The time is now to replicate this urgency to address the antibiotic resistance crisis.
