Published: 11 October 2023
A team of researchers from St George’s, University of London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have won the Innovation Award Runner-up prize in the Vivli Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Surveillance Open Data Re-Use Data Challenge.
The challenge, funded by Wellcome, serves as a catalyst for the inventive reutilization of the wealth of surveillance data available within the AMR Register. It is in response to the WHO identifying AMR as one of the top 10 global health threats facing humanity, with antimicrobial-resistant infections having the potential to become the leading cause of death worldwide by 2050.
The team, led by St George’s PhD student Jacob Wildfire, developed an innovative way to explore variations in AMR between patient groups.
Doctors need to make decisions about what antibiotics to use to treat an infection, and hence need to know whether an antibiotic will work in that patient or not. Bacteria are often classified as either “resistant” or “susceptible”. This resistance classification is determined using the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) - the lowest level of an antibiotic that can stop a bacteria growing. By using this binary format, researchers lose a heap of information, such as how resistant an isolate is to an antibiotic.
The hypothesis tested by the team was that variation in the distribution of MICs across patient groupings (e.g. age, site of infection or sex) could be used to identify similarities and differences that could lead to new insights into the spread of AMR. For example, using the multinational data, the team found evidence of a trend for old patients to have bacterial infections with greater resistance than younger patients, which varied for different “bug-drug” combinations.
Identifying patients in need of targeted interventions
However, the team emphasise that the real value of this work is its applicability to more localised data sets. In low resource health care settings, which may only have MIC data available, this method could be used to identify subgroups that may require targeted interventions, such as changes in the prescribing policy for those at-risk groups.
“Quite frankly, it’s very exciting to have won this award! It was one of the most fun experiences I’ve had during my PhD, and leading the team was such a worthwhile challenge. It also feels good to have produced something that I think could help with the impending antimicrobial resistance crisis. I truly think what we’ve done is novel, and in an age where resistance is creeping up on us from all sides, we need all the new ideas we can get.”
- Jake Wildfire, PhD student in St George’s Infection and Immunity Institute -
Jake led the team which included fellow St George’s PhD student Alastair Clements, and LSHTM-based PhD student Naomi Fuller, Dr Naomi Waterlow, and Dr Gwen Knight. The group are all members of Dr Knight’s research group, which focuses on the dynamics of AMR.
Dr Gwen Knight said: “This data challenge pushed us to blend our AMR research backgrounds to generate an idea that is highly innovative and allowed us to develop as multidisciplinary scientists – individually, and as a team. I’m excited by the potential of an open-source tool based on this method, that could be used in local settings to exploit the abundance of MIC data.”
A total of 56 teams from 28 different countries participated in the AMR Data Challenge. This event served as a unique platform for multidisciplinary teams to leverage high-quality industry AMR surveillance data, proposing ground-breaking advancements and tools for use in AMR surveillance.
Learn more about how St George's is leading the global effort against AMR