The McGill Antimicrobial Resistance Centre emphasises the urgency of reducing the global threat of AMR and highlights some of the Centre’s key work in this area.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the top ten global health threats and poses a major risk to public health and the economy. As the threat continues to increase, it is vital that organisations across the globe work together to deliver an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to tackling the challenge.
Based at McGill University in Canada, the McGill Antimicrobial Resistance Centre is one such organisation dedicated to addressing the issue of AMR through interdisciplinary research and education. The Innovation Platform spoke to the Centre’s Dr Dao Nguyen to find out more about its work.
Why is antimicrobial resistance such a threat to public health and why is it important that we tackle it?
Antimicrobial resistance occurs when microbes (bacteria, fungi, parasites) no longer respond to anti-infective medicines, leading to infections that are harder to prevent and treat. This is associated with increased risk of disease transmission, severe illness, and death. Resistant bacteria already directly cause 1.3 million deaths and are associated with five million deaths every year worldwide. If not addressed, AMR is projected to become the leading cause of death globally by 2050, jeopardising health, food and water security with devastating health, economic and social impacts across the world.
AMR presents highly complex challenges that no single sector or approach can address alone. These range from the negative health effects of ineffectively treated infections and a dry drug development pipeline, to the inappropriate use of antimicrobials and transmission of AMR in clinical and agricultural settings. Solutions must also be multi-pronged, from better and more accessible diagnostics and surveillance, interventions for infection control and antimicrobial stewardship, to innovations for novel therapeutics. With 80% of antimicrobials used in non-clinical settings, global and national AMR action plans call for a multisectoral One Health approach which recognises the interconnection between human, animal and environmental health, and the risk of AMR transmission through their shared environment.
Can you explain more about the Antimicrobial Resistance Centre and the key focuses of your work?
Tackling the vast array of AMR challenges requires multipronged interventions and solutions, and research and innovations are essential to the fight against AMR.
The McGill AMR Centre brings together over 50 investigators from McGill University and beyond – namely the Faculties of Medicine and Health Sciences, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Law and Engineering. With its members’ diverse expertise that span clinical, biomedical, and biological sciences, to engineering, computational and natural sciences, the McGill AMR Centre is uniquely and ideally poised to advance collaborative and interdisciplinary research. Our centre also draws from the academic excellence and expertise at McGill, a Canadian university ranked among the world’s best, and an institution-wide initiative on infection and immunity (McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection in Immunity).
The Centre’s research efforts are focused around three main themes: namely, infectious disease and AMR diagnostics; AMR surveillance, evolution and prevention; and novel anti-infective therapeutics. Our members’ research spans fundamental AMR mechanisms using model organisms, AMR evolution and transmission in experimental systems, natural and farm environments as well as clinical settings, to novel diagnostic technology development and therapeutics discovery. We also support AMR training and outreach activities within the scientific communities and with the general public through seminars, symposia, intensive courses, and media campaigns.
What major areas is the Center working on?
Diagnostics:
Diagnostics are essential tools for combating AMR. They serve to detect pathogens in humans, animals and food, to diagnose infectious diseases, and enable appropriate antimicrobial use and surveillance of AMR in clinical, agricultural and environmental settings. New technologies need to be developed to address unmet needs, and existing tools need to be better used or implemented. The AMR Centre aims to improve infectious disease and AMR diagnostics for human and animal health. It brings together clinicians and scientists who evaluate and implement existing technologies, and develop and apply new technological platforms for next-generation diagnostics.
AMR surveillance, evolution and prevention:
AMR is encountered across healthcare, agricultural and environmental settings. The tracking of AMR, the understanding of AMR evolution and transmission and the strategies to prevent AMR, are both essential and challenging. We leverage experimental model systems, from laboratory microbial communities to complex natural ecosystems, to study the evolution, emergence and transmission of AMR. We also study strategies to prevent the emergence and transmission of AMR, from infection control practices, engineering of novel anti-microbial biomaterials, to antibiotic stewardship interventions to mitigate antimicrobial misuse or overuse through the strategic use of diagnostics and antimicrobials in clinical and farm settings.
Therapeutic innovations:
As existing medicines are increasingly becoming ineffective and a dry anti-infective pipeline, our centre aims to address the gap that has been left around early-stage discovery. Our members have expertise in AMR mechanisms, structural biology of microbial targets and biosynthetic machinery, infectious diseases, microbiology for a wide range of human and animal pathogens, and numerous animal infection models for pre-clinical studies. Research in anti-infectives thus spans antimicrobial target discovery, structure-based and rational drug design, novel antimicrobial compounds and ‘non-conventional’ anti-infectives such as anti-virulence and immunomodulators. Finally, preventive and therapeutic strategies also include microbiome manipulation in humans and animals.
What are some of the key achievements from past work at the Centre?
Since its launch three years ago in 2021, the McGill AMR Centre has built a dynamic and diverse scientific community, which it engages through its quarterly seminars, annual research symposium, bimonthly newsletters and other educational activities. In May 2024, the Centre hosted the EDAR7 (Environmental Dimensions of AMR) conference – an international conference which welcomed over 400 participants from more than 40 countries. We have enabled local, national and international collaborations that have led to funded projects on a wide range of projects such as biomarker-enabled antimicrobial stewardship interventions, AMR surveillance in wastewater, farms and fisheries, and AI-enabled antimicrobial drug discovery. Building on McGill’s entrepreneurial track record as the leading North American university having launched the most startups (according to the 2023 AUTM licensing survey), we have partnered with the McGill Innovation Fund to support academic teams developing innovations that address AMR and have the most promising commercialisation potential.
How important is collaboration in your work?
The challenges of AMR cannot be overcome by teams working in disciplinary or institutional silos. Collaborations are at the core of the Centre’s mission and vision. We therefore aim to catalyse collaborations that build on the expertise of our members and the rich research ecosystem at McGill, whether they be between academic groups, or with non-academic partners, including biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, government and non-profit organisations. The Horizon 2020 programmes will thus present new opportunities to develop collaborations between the McGill AMR Centre and EU partners.
Please note, this article will also appear in the 20th edition of our quarterly publication.
