COMBACTE’s Holds First Online General Assembly

COMBACTE Program Coordinator Marc Bonten kicked off this GA with a brief overview of the four COMBACTE projects and their duration. Following him, keynote speaker Peter Beyer from the World Health Organization (WHO) provided an interesting presentation concerning antibacterial agents in clinical and preclinical development. He shared WHO’s comprehensive overview of the preclinical antibacterial pipeline to date that is based on publicly available data. More information can be found here. Peter Beyer is Senior Advisor in the Antimicrobial Resistance Division of the World Health Organization.

A general overview per project were given by the EFPIA leads. CEO Florence Séjourné from Da Volterra took the word for COMBACTE-NET and AstraZeneca’s Principal Scientist Alexey Ruzin presented COMBACTE-MAGNET. Project Coordinator Ron de Winter (UMC Utrecht) replaced Pfizer’s Global Procurement Enablement Leader Lisa Grimsditch in giving an update for COMBACTE-CARE.

Principal Clinical Scientist Kerrie Davies from the University of Leeds was invited to speak about best practices and lessons learned in COMBACTE-CDI.

What was especially clear during the meeting was the complexity of the presented trials and the ambitious timelines. Another notable factor was the importance of having a strong infrastructure such as CLIN-Net and LAB-Net to support these complex studies.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the studies was also evident, and showed how much some of the study activities suffered. On the other hand there had been many lessons learnt on the way, especially concerning pandemic response – something which will be beneficial in tackling antimicrobial resistance.

Marc Bonten closed the GA presentation series with an update on the future of COMBACTE: ECRAID, and the plans on creating a self-sustaining antibacterial development network that expands on the clinical and laboratory networks built in COMBACTE, as well as other projects such as PREPARE.