WORLD EXPERTS RECOGNISE COMBINATIONS LIKE HELPERBY’S
PBS News Hour first part: report on collapsing antibiotic companies
Many of the latest antibiotics companies are failing. Our market driven economy hasn’t invested properly in the public goods to protect us in times of crises. Just as with our lack of preparation for the COVID-19 pandemic, so too with the antibiotic pipeline going bust.
PBS News Hour second part; How a crumbling antibiotics infrastructure could yield “catastrophe”
Big pharma companies won’t buy antibiotics from small start-up companies because they can’t see how to make them profitable. The small start-ups can’t do it themselves because they can’t sell to hospitals at a high enough price to stay afloat. Without new antibiotic options, we could be facing another COVID-19 scale catastrophe without proper preparation.
BBC reports Coronavirus continuing to develop globally
The Guardian Announces ‘Sepsis deaths around the world are twice as high as previously thought’.
Urinary Tract Infections Affect Millions. The Cures Are Faltering.
For generations, urinary tract infections, one of the world’s most common ailments, have been easily and quickly cured with a simple course of antibiotics.But there is growing evidence that the infections, which afflict millions of Americans a year, mostly women, are increasingly resistant to these medicines, turning a once-routine diagnosis into one that is leading to more hospitalizations, graver illnesses and prolonged discomfort from the excruciating burning sensation that the infection brings.
Click here to read the full article
Antibiotic Combinations Could Be A Revolution In Fight Against Superbugs
By combining several antibiotics in one go, researchers claim they’ve stumbled on a promising new treatment to prevent antibiotic resistance.
Click here to read the full article
Antibiotic Resistant Superbugs Creating Deadly Risks For Hip & Knee Operations
Hip & knee operations are becoming increasingly lethal due to the rise of antibiotic resistance health officials have warned.
Click here to read the full article
Take Over Pharma To Create New Medicines, Says Top Adviser
Part of the drugs industry should be taken over to make new antibiotics, an influential economist has argued.
Click here to read the full article
Antibiotic-Resistance-Plan-To-Fight-Urgent-Global-Threat
Drug resistant superbugs are as big a threat as climate change the health secretary will say as he unveils a new five year plan to tackle the problem.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46973641
Develop New Antibiotics or Face Fines, Drug Firms Told
Research into preventing an antibiotics crisis could stop within a few years unless pharmaceutical companies are financially penalised for pulling out of developing drugs, an economist has warned.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/develop-new-antibiotics-or-face-fines-drug-firms-told-9znvngm76
Figures reveal emergence of ‘pan-resistant’ infections
Scots gran has all limbs cut off after PAPER CUT leads to sepsis
New Thinking Is Required To Create Desperately Needed New Antibiotics. We Must Act Now
Click here to read the full article
“Antibiotic apocalypse”: doctors sound alarm over drug resistance
The terrifying prospect that even routine operations will be impossible to perform has been raised by experts alarmed by the rise of drug-resistant genes.
Scientists attending a recent meeting of the American Society for Microbiology reported they had uncovered a highly disturbing trend. They revealed that bacteria containing a gene known as mcr-1 – which confers resistance to the antibiotic colistin – had spread round the world at an alarming rate since its original discovery 18 months earlier. In one area of China, it was found that 25% of hospital patients now carried the gene.
Colistin is known as the “antibiotic of last resort”. In many parts of the world doctors have turned to its use because patients were no longer responding to any other antimicrobial agent. Now resistance to its use is spreading across the globe.
Read the full article on The Guardian website
What happens when antibiotics stop working?
David Aaronovitch – whose life was saved by antibiotics after a routine operation went catastrophically wrong six years ago – talks to the scientists on a mission to solve the problem of drug-resistant infections. It’s a race against time: the alternative is a future where a graze could be fatal.
This is a story of four generations: our grandparents, ourselves, our children and our children’s children. It is a story of a cycle of death, hope, cure, fear and – quite possibly – death again. And, for me, it begins with a woman in her early thirties called Ida May Walmsley.
Ida Walmsley, a former actress, married to a soldier, had just given birth to her third daughter. It was summertime, and she was sitting out in the garden of a friend’s house, the baby asleep indoors. And something, probably a gnat, bit her. The next day, a relative – a hockey mistress at a nearby girls’ school – wrote in her diary that Ida’s cheek was “very swollen”. A day later and she was “very ill”.…
Want to read more?
Read the full article on The Times Website (subscription required)
Antibiotic resistance breakers: can repurposed drugs fill the antibiotic discovery void?
Concern over antibiotic resistance is growing, and new classes of antibiotics, particularly against Gram-negative bacteria, are needed. However, even if the scientific hurdles can be overcome, it could take decades for sufficient numbers of such antibiotics to become available.
Click here to read the full article
Which invention won Britain’s Greatest Invention?
This clip (8:50) involves former newsreader Angela Rippon putting the case for antibiotics to be the winner of a poll to identify Britain’s Greatest Invention.
View on Biology On The Box (account required for video)
Resistance to last-ditch antibiotics has spread further than anticipated
http://www.nature.com/news/resistance-to-last-ditch-antibiotic-has-spread-farther-than-anticipated-1.22140
Click here to read the full article
Doctors call for urgent action on deadly superbug threat
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-04-21/worse-than-mrsa-experts-call-for-action-on-deadly-new-superbug
Click here to read the full article
Doctors warn serious threat to patients from almost untreatable superbug
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/21/almost-untreatable-superbug-poses-serious-threat-to-patients-doctors-warn-carbapenemase-producing-enterobacteriaceae
Click here to read the full article
Woman in USA Killed by Superbug resistant to all antibiotics
2017 January 13th. The Telegraph news article about a woman in Nevada that has been killed by a superbug that proved resistant to every antibiotic available in the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) comments.
To read the article in full please click here
CDC sees ‘steady increase’ in drug-resistant bacteria
The patient ... described yesterday [by officials] has a Colistin-resistant plasmid that spreads resistance. [Colistin] is last antibiotic in our arsenal.
Click to watch the video on YouTube
Helperby - News
On March 9th 2016 Helperby Therapeutic held a pre-IND meeting with the FDA division of Anti-Infective products. The outcome is a road map for the clinical development of a drug product for the treatment of complicated urinary tract infections.
This is an important area of research due to the rapidly emerging multi drug resistance of gram negative infections.
Helperby Participating in ‘Combating Antibiotic Resistance’ Webcast
Helperby Therapeutics to participate in Webcast on Combating antibiotic resistance London, United Kingdom.
Professor Anthony R.M. Coates, Chief Scientific Officer of Helperby Therapeutics, will participate in a BioPharma Dealmakers webcast, sponsored in part by Helperby Therapeutics, featuring five companies innovating antibiotic technologies. The webcast, part of the BioPharma Dealmakers series, is scheduled for 11:00 am ET on March 9.
Scientists find MCR-1 in food and humans in UK
Scientists have detected the first plasmid mediated colistin resistance (mcr-1) gene in food and human isolates in England and Wales.
Click here to read the full article
Resistance to last resort antibiotic has now spread across the globe
The last drug has fallen. Bacteria carrying a gene that allows them to resist polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort for some kinds of infection, have been found in Denmark and China, prompting a global search for the gene.
Click here to read the full article
Antibiotic resistance: World on cusp of ‘post-antibiotic era’
The world is on the cusp of a "post-antibiotic era", scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed.
Click here to read the full article
Antibiotics - the beginning or the end?
- The world is running out of antibiotics: “A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it.” Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General WHO, 14 March, 2012.
- Finding new antibiotic classes is too difficult, too slow and too costly.
- Rejuvenating old antibiotics with Antibiotic Resistance Breakers could be an important way forward.
Click here to watch the video in full on telegraph.co.uk
What Do We Do When Antibiotics Don’t Work Anymore?
Penicillin changed everything. Infections that had previously killed were suddenly quickly curable. Yet as Maryn McKenna shares in this sobering talk, we've squandered the advantages afforded us by that and later antibiotics. Drug-resistant bacteria mean we're entering a post-antibiotic world — and it won't be pretty. There are, however, things we can do ... if we start right now.
Click here to watch the TED talk in full on ted.com
The Observer highlights Helperby
Low profit margins and the difficulty of finding new drugs has led to big pharma shutting down its antibiotics programmes. But now researchers are adopting new approaches to tackle drug-resistant superbugs.
Matt Cooper, a medical chemist at the University of Queensland, Australia, puffs out his cheeks and scratches his head. He’s trying to explain why the pipeline for new antibiotics is quite so dry. “The problem,” he says, “is that finding new antibiotics is now really, really hard.”
Click here to read the article in full on theguardian.com
Analysis: Antibiotic Apocalypse
A terrible future could be on the horizon, a future which rips one of the greatest tools of medicine out of the hands of doctors.
A simple cut to your finger could leave you fighting for your life. Luck will play a bigger role in your future than any doctor could.
The most basic operations - getting an appendix removed or a hip replacement - could become deadly.
Cancer treatments and organ transplants could kill you. Childbirth could once again become a deadly moment in a woman’s life.
It’s a future without antibiotics.
View Complete Article on BBC Website
Helperby Antibiotic Resistance Breakers on BBC News
Please see the following video clip from the BBC News, and the BBC's Panorama, discussing how Helperby can help with the fight against antibiotic resistance
BBC News with Prof. Anthony Coates
BBC Panorama Antibiotic Apocalypse
Helperby Antibiotic Resistance Breakers
Helperby is now a member of the newly launched BEAM Alliance
Helperby is now a member of the newly launched the Alliance of Biotechs of Europe innovating in Anti-Microbial Resistance, called the BEAM Alliance. This group of European biotechnology companies is committed to tackling the unique challenges facing the industry in the antibacterial field and currently regroups 34 companies from 10 European countries.
