Antibiotic resistance is reaching dangerously high levels in all parts of the world, making infections such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and blood poisoning more difficult—and sometimes impossible—to treat. To combat this global epidemic and help health care teams more quickly diagnose patients with infections, two agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced a prize competition for new rapid, point-of-care laboratory diagnostic tests for drug-resistant bacteria.
The Antimicrobial Resistance Diagnostic Challenge will award $20 million in prizes from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) over the next four years in support of the goals outlined in the White House’s National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria.
The structure of the awards is a deliberate departure for the agencies.
“This is a different way of funding research,” NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, said in a video on the research agency’s website. “Traditionally, NIH waits for grant applications or we send out a note saying we’re interested in research in a particular field, but this is more like a prize—a big prize. And we hope that the size of that award will attract attention from people who might have worked on something else and now will work on this.”
Two key clinical challenges informed the decision to create the competition.
One is simply the need for clinicians to distinguish between viral and bacterial infections to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause at least 2 million infections and 23,000 deaths each year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The other major challenge “is to find out when somebody has a bacterial infection that is going to be resistant to existing antibiotics and therefore needs to be treated in a special way,” Dr. Collins said. “Today, if somebody has pneumonia, for instance, or a urinary tract infection, the way in which we find out whether that particular infection is highly resistant takes about 72 hours.
“By that time, the person may be very sick … [and] the resistant organism may have been passed to other people because you didn’t know to put this person in isolation. So the other challenge is come up with a test where, in three or four hours, you can say, ‘This person has a highly resistant organism. Let’s bring a wholly different approach to taking care of them.’”
The competition will play out over these three phases:
- Concepts must be submitted by Jan. 9 for the first phase of the competition. As many as 20 semifinalists will be selected from the applicant pool, each receiving up to $50,000.
- In the second phase of the competition, on Dec. 3, 2018, up to 10 finalists will be selected to each receive up to $100,000. These funds can be used to develop prototypes for evaluation by two CLIA-certified independent laboratories, which will be considered when final winners are selected.
- In the final phase, winners are expected to be announced on July 31, 2020. The competition specifies that up to three winners can be selected, and winners will share an amount equal to or greater than $18 million.
The NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and ASPR’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority each contributed $10 million to the competition. The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration provided technical and regulatory expertise to its design.
For more information about the challenge or how to apply, visit the HHS website.
“My hope is that this competition will spur exceptional innovators to rise to the challenge and deliver effective tools,” Dr. Collins said. “This is a huge public health problem. We need all hands on deck.”
