World Antimicrobial Awareness Week: Bugworks Tackles the Superbug Challenge

The MTPConnect Podcast

It’s World Antimicrobial Awareness Week and this year’s theme is “Preventing Antimicrobial Resistance Together”. We chat to Bugworks, a clinical stage pharmaceutical company, headquartered in the US, with subsidiaries in India and Australia, currently developing novel antibacterials and immunotherapies.

Bugworks’ Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Dr Anand Anandkumar, joins the podcast from Bangalore, India to talk about the challenges of developing new antimicrobials, the boost from CARB-X accelerator that is keeping their lights on, and why push and pull incentives are vital for innovation. Dr Anandkumar reveals why the company chose Adelaide in South Australia as the site for the first-in-human Phase 1 clinical trial of one of two antibacterial agents in development. And we pose the question – does Australia need a CARB-X style accelerator to supercharge its efforts to curb AMR?

Joining host Caroline Duell is Andrew Bowskill, MTPConnect’s Director of Stakeholder Engagement for Queensland and co-chair of the Australian Antimicrobial Resistance Network (AAMRNet), established by MTPConnect as Australia’s first multi-stakeholder expert group formed to address the impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on human health. AAMRNet, in conjunction with CSIRO, recently released the ‘Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Impact Report: How big is Australia's AMR threat?, which reviews gaps in our data collection methods to find out how many people are dying from drug-resistant infections in Australia.