The AMR data repository, hosted by the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO), now covers nearly 70 countries and 783,000 patients, after launching last year to provide a secure, sustainable platform for global AMR data sharing. Holdings currently include 44 datasets from 28 different Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Project collaborators.
‘We are grateful to our collaborators for sharing their data with GRAM, under the terms of the repository,' said GRAM Principal and Co-Principal Investigators, Profs Ben Cooper and Christiane Dolecek, in a statement. 'We would like other researchers to benefit from AMR data collected by GRAM, especially those in low- and middle-income countries—which often experience high levels of resistance and a shortage of available data’.
With support from the UK Fleming Fund and Wellcome Trust, GRAM co-launched the repository with IDDO to streamline its processes and make AMR data available to external researchers who receive permission from data-contributing collaborators.
GRAM, a partnership between the University of Oxford and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), has already used repository data to provide the first comprehensive clinical estimate of bacterial AMR burden in 2019. Read the study in the Lancet. Last year the team expanded this work to provide global AMR burden estimates from 1990 to 2021, with projections to 2050. View the manuscript here.
Dr Makoto Saito, an infectious disease doctor and IDDO researcher within the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, is one investigator currently making use of the data. With a background in malaria research, Dr Saito said he looks forward to investigating AMR because it affects so many aspects of clinical management.
‘AMR is everything for an infectious disease physician’, Dr Saito said. ‘I’m quite excited’.
Dr Saito will explore patterns in ‘cross resistance’, when a pathogen becomes resistant to more than one antimicrobial; he will also study bacteria that produce drug-resistant enzymes, including so-called extended spectrum beta lactamase (ESBL) Escherichia coli.
The research could provide insights into which antibiotics are most likely to succeed—and where.
Considering the many potential questions that researchers could apply to GRAM data, Dr Saito said investigators could pursue various types of studies. For example, he noted that AMR scholars often focus on blood cultures, but that the repository contains other patient samples too, including urine or cerebrospinal results.
‘There are quite a lot of questions remaining to be answered’, Dr Saito said.
