Words by GOLD newsdesk
The Global Antibiotic Research & Development Partnership (GARDP) will receive €50m in additional funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research over the next five years, it was announced at the World Health Summit in Berlin this week.
Responsible for developing new treatments for drug-resistant infections to combat antibiotic resistance (AR), the GARDP aims to bring five new treatments to market by 2025 and has a funding target of €500 million.
“We are deeply grateful to Germany for its renewed investment in GARDP,” said Dr Manica Balasegaram, Executive Director, GARDP, emphasising that this “characterises their remarkable leadership in global health and efforts to tackle the existing pandemic of antibiotic resistance”.
Germany is the leading funder of GARDP and has pledged a total of €116m since the organisation was founded in 2016. Other backers include the UK government, which made a £4.5 million donation in June this year – taking its total contributions to £19m, as well as Monaco, Canada and the Wellcome Trust.
AR is one of the top 10 global health issues and resulted in the deaths of nearly 1.3 million people in 2019. This number is higher than deaths by HIV and breast cancer in the same year, and one in five deaths from drug-resistant infections are recorded to be in children.
“We need to focus on finding solutions to improve access to antibiotics for everyone, everywhere,” added Jeremy Knox, Head of Policy, Infectious Disease, Wellcome Trust.