CDC invested more than $14 million last year in academic and healthcare innovators and other researchers to combat antibiotic resistance (AR), according to the agency’s latest AR Investment Map—totaling more than $125 million toward innovation, plus millions more to public health departments, since 2016. The interactive map shows CDC’s commitment to discover, test, and scale up strategies that protect people from antibiotic-resistant germs, which infect someone in the United States every 11 seconds and kill someone every 15 minutes.
Through its AR Solutions Initiative, CDC invests and collaborates with innovators to find solutions that protect people by studying antibiotic resistance in health care, food, the environment (e.g., water and soil), and communities. This includes:
- Collaborating with medical academic investigators to protect patients from antibiotic-resistant germs in healthcare settings. This includes research on improving cleaning methods in intensive care units, assessing stewardship programs that improve antibiotic use, and obtaining stronger surveillance data that can drive action.
- Identifying public health approaches that protect people, their microbiomes, and the effectiveness of antibiotics. These projects focus on, for example, how to restore a microbiome (the community of naturally-occurring germs in and on our bodies) that has been wiped out by antibiotics, and a test that can predict how an antibiotic might impact a specific person’s microbiome.
- Addressing knowledge gaps around how antibiotic resistance in agriculture and the environment may impact human health. This includes investigating how water systems near healthcare and agriculture settings may impact people.
Read about each of the Fiscal Year 2019 innovation projects and other CDC work to combat antibiotic resistance: www.cdc.gov/ARinvestments.
