Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a huge, looming problem. Carrying out clinical trials of new treatments is very difficult, and one of the reasons is that the absolute number of infections caused by AMR in a single hospital is actually quite low, meaning individual sites don’t generally have enough cases to be able to properly evaluate a treatment. Bacterial infections also need to be treated as soon as they are diagnosed, meaning that the window for testing treatment options is small.

As part of the COMBACTE project, a network of prepared and equipped clinical sites connected to diagnostic laboratories, called CLIN-Net and LAB-Net, were launched in 2014 to help overcome this problem. The network provides strong infrastructure to run clinical trials of new antimicrobial agents across multiple sites, and is the only one of its kind in the world, putting Europe in a leadership position in clinical research into infectious diseases.

Read more...