Grant: Canada-UK Partnership on Antibiotic Resistance - LOI

Antibiotics are essential to modern health care. Not only are they important for the treatment of infection, they enable many clinical producers from cancer chemotherapy to transplantation to surgery. However the use of antibiotics is under threat as a result of the emergence of bacteria resistant to these drugs. Resistance is a natural phenomenon, driven by evolution by natural selection and facilitated by a reservoir of resistance genes circulating in bacterial populations in the clinic and the environment. Understanding the origins and functions of these resistance genes will enable us to develop new drugs, new diagnostics and better manage our current antibiotic arsenal. This requires the leveraging of modern genomic tools to measure and monitor resistance genes. We will establish a new research Team in Antibiotic Resistance Genomics (TARGet) that brings together researchers and clinicians from Canada and the United Kingdom for the study of the genomics of resistance. TARGet will bring 21st Century 'omics' biology to the problem of resistance in a highly collaborative fashion. The end result will be new understanding of resistance, a central database of resistance elements open to researchers and clinicians across the globe, insight into new drugs and diagnostics, and trainees with experience from bench-to-bedside in the problem of resistance in Canada and the UK.