Antimicrobial resistance is a global threat to public health, agriculture and food security.

Worldwide healthcare projections estimate an impact of 10 million deaths at a cost of $100 trillion annually by 2050.

In Singaporean hospitals, currently 30-50% of infections are drug-resistant to one or more antibiotics, resulting in increasingly limited treatment options for many common infections. Antimicrobial resistance occurs when microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites evolve genotypic and/or phenotypic changes that enable them to resist the effect of antimicrobial drugs. AMR renders our current treatment arsenal ineffective.

The global spread of multi-drug resistant “superbug” infections, together with the emergence of new resistance mechanisms, pose a serious threat to our health system and limit our ability to treat infectious diseases. Likewise, without effective antimicrobials, common medical interventions such as surgery, organ transplantation, cancer chemotherapy and diabetes management will pose increasing risk.

The development pipeline for new drugs cannot keep pace with increasing rates of rapidly evolving resistance. We need new innovative approaches to combat antimicrobial resistance and the SMART AMR IRG aims to address this need.