Grant: Canada-UK Partnership on Antibiotic Resistance - LOI

The antibiotic era, stemming from the deployment of penicillin, introduced arguably the most successful medicines of all time, impacting dramatically on life expectancy by decreasing childhood and adult deaths from infections, and enabling complex surgeries, transplantations and cancer chemotherapy. However there has been an explosion of antibiotic resistance compounded by a paucity of truly novel compounds under development or entering the clinic. Thus we suggest that it is essential to explore new paradigms for anti-infective therapy. One approach involves host-directed therapies, whereby natural mechanisms in the host are exploited to enhance therapy; such treatments would act on the host rather than the pathogen and thus will not engender resistance. The objective is to initiate or enhance protective antimicrobial immunity, whilst limiting inflammation-induced tissue injury. We propose to establish a transnational Canada UK Collaborative Group in the critical area of development of immune modulatory approaches to overcome antibiotic resistant infections. The goals will include (1) using systems approaches to understand and define new ways of favourably manipulating the immune system; (2) establishing advanced models for investigating immunomodulatory therapeutics; and (3) testing promising candidate immunomodulators for useful anti-infective activities. This program will deliver new strategies to treat antibiotic resistant infections given the ominous potential for widespread failure of traditional approaches.