A year after the airing of a scary documentary by Frontline called attention to nightmare bacteria that knows no effective antibiotic remedy, the Obama administration set down the beginnings of a strategy to ramp up regional monitoring programs and an effective way to report detection. The Centers for Disease Control, which is playing a central role in these efforts, offered a vivid report that provided some perspective. It produced an infographic to illustrate how that might look.
The initiative also involves setting up a national task force that is expected to produce a five-year plan by February next year for carrying this out. Although there are many things that have contributed to the current state of things, overpresciption of antibiotics, the wide use of antibiotics for livestock and the paltry number of big pharma companies with antibiotics in their drug development pipeline have each played a part.
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology offered some suggestions too, one of which involves the CDC allocating $90 million to support state grants for companies and organizations that can detect antibiotic resistance, outbreak response and prevention initiatives that include a more disciplined approach to prescribing antibiotics. Several early- and growth-stage companies are working on this challenge, particularly in health IT and in collaboration with hospitals.
athenahealth and Epocrates devised a mobile app called Bugs + Drugs to identify bacteria types that are pervasive (and not so common) in a patient’s geographic area to help inform doctor’s choices for the most appropriate antibiotic to prescribe. It confronts the overprescription issue through technology that’s easily shared.
LuminaCareSolutions processes the results of a PCR test, and also processes antibiotic information and data points around bacteria. By combining biotech and big data, it uses predictive modeling analytics to diagnose hospital-acquired infections faster and determine the level of resistance for drug-resistant bacterial infections.
Teqqa was founded by Dr. Dan Peterson, a former CDC Medical Epidemiologist who also founded a health IT company using Web-based surveillance to manage hospital-acquired infections, which he sold to Premier in 2006. Its real-time risk assessment platform for antibiotic resistance helps physicians predict and understand trends and patterns of resistance. By predicting and understanding trends and patterns of resistance, clinicians can choose the best medications to treat a patient’s infection, and provides the health system real, actionable data to make broad recommendations for use of these life-saving drugs
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine researchers mapped out sepsis hotspots around the country. They created the maps using ICD-10 codes to identify primary cause of death codes for infection and severe sepsis for 2010.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Theradoc developed a health IT platform to improve stewardship over hospital-acquired infections and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It takes a similar approach as some of the other companies listed here. It uses big data to cast a wide net and analyze organism resistance and trends by hospital and location. A surveillance program also helps different medical departments collaborate.
