Time for Precision: Rethinking antimicrobial use to combat AMR globally

The rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), driven by relentless microbial evolution, threatens the foundations of global healthcare.Rather than following the so far undeliverable promise of evermore broad-spectrum antibiotics, infectious disease treatment can follow the example of oncology, which has, over a short period, augmented a platform of commodity anti-cancer agents with precision medicines and diagnostics to combat cancer evolution on a personalised basis.It is this shift that has allowed a significant extension in survival and has created entirely new subsectors of biotech.Sophisticated thinking and concerted action has also made changes to clinical practice and pathways.Applying these principles, precision antimicrobials, guided by rapid diagnostics and used alongside commodity products, offer a way to target resistant infections more effectively.Moreover, thinking about multidrug resistance medicines as precision agents for rare occurrences opens up precented reimbursement frameworks that can breaking the economic logjam that has smothered the sector for a generation.This is not the science of the future.The foundations of precision antimicrobial approaches are already emerging, with an ecosystem of initiatives to wrap around and support their development.Among these, PACE (Pathways to Antimicrobial Clinical Efficacy), a global AMR R&D platform, that funds and offers wrap-around support for the development of new diagnostics and therapeutics, providing crucial infrastructure for emerging pipelines.Precision approaches have the potential to save lives that could otherwise be lost to Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.07