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ND4BB: addressing the antimicrobial resistance crisis

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 12, pages 231–232 (2014)Cite this article

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The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) recently launched its third public–private partnership, ENABLE (European Gram-negative Antibacterial Engine), to tackle the shortage of effective antimicrobial drugs for Gram-negative pathogens.

The extraordinary power of antibiotics has transformed modern medicine by saving countless lives, but every use of an antibiotic carries the risk of selecting for resistance, undermining its future use. Owing to the extensive use and misuse of the available antibiotic arsenal and the shortage of new drugs reaching the market, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is now a major threat to healthcare worldwide. The alarm was raised 10 years ago by the Infectious Diseases Society of America in the first of their series of Bad Bugs, No Drugs papers1. Since then, the lack of an innovative and sustainable pipeline of new antimicrobial agents has been the subject of much discussion, and in recent years, several important initiatives to tackle the diminishing pipeline have been established.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vice President and Head of Infection, Global Medicines Development, AstraZeneca, 35 Gatehouse Drive, Waltham, Massachusetts 02451, USA.,

    John H. Rex

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  1. John H. Rex
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Correspondence to John H. Rex.

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Competing interests

J.H.R. is an employee and shareholder of AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. He is a non-executive director of, shareholder of, and consultant to F2G Pharmaceuticals and a consultant to Advent Life Sciences (an investor in F2G Pharmaceuticals).

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Rex, J. ND4BB: addressing the antimicrobial resistance crisis. Nat Rev Microbiol 12, 231–232 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro3245

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