Antibiotics are highly efficient drugs to kill pathogenic bacteria with low side effects. For more than 70 years, the massive use of these miracle drugs has saved millions of human and animal lives. Unfortunately new resistance arises rapidly following the use of new antibiotics, leading to the emergence of multidrug resistant (MDR) bugs, treatment escape and treatment failure. Outbreaks of MDR strains are particularly feared in the hospital environment, due to the presence of suitable conditions for their propagation close to high-risk patients. In these settings, controlling the spread of MDR strains requires specific and costly confinement measures. Today, MDR bacteria are a worldwide public health threat with a high risk of relapse or reinfection, increased mortality and tremendous costs.
Defeating AMR and preventing a global pandemic requires multidisciplinary efforts to better understand resistance emergence, persistence and dissemination. It is also a priority to further decipher the complex mode of action of antibiotics to improve their use in human and animal medicine and to develop new antibiotics and therapeutic options.
This research program brings together more than 40 multidisciplinary teams from the Institut Pasteur International Network. They are tackling the issue of antibiotic resistance according to seven major research axes:
- Epidemiology – Global health and mathematical modelling of the spread of antibiotic resistance
- Genomics of antibiotic resistance and the horizontal transmission of genetic determinants
- In vitro and in vivo mechanisms of resistance
- The discovery of new targets and the characterization of drug targets
- Drug screening – and the discovery of new antibiotics
- Identification of “natural” compounds against MDR bacteria
- Alternative strategies to antibiotics