If, say’s Tim Walsh, professor of medical microbiology at a new Oxford University institute being set up to combat antibiotic resistance, “Covid is like the short, sharp earthquake, …antimicrobial resistance is the massive tsunami in the background.”

Professor Walsh is far from alone in his fear of the long-term threat posed by “silent pandemic”, of antibiotic resistance that is already killing 1.5 million people annually. 25 years since the introduction of the last new class of antibiotics, scientists are increasingly worried about the growing number and strength of “superbugs”.

Having been made aware of the problem by a surgeon friend, Sir Jim Ratcliff, founder of chemicals giant Ineos, one of the UK’s largest private companies, has given Oxford University £100 million to fund research into the problem. That will be achieved by the new institute, whose scientists now have financial support secured for the next 5 years.

Oxford University vice-chancellor Professor Louise Richardson referred to the donation as “one of the biggest gifts ever to any British university”. She went on to explain the significance of the donation with:

“I think that the pandemic has shown us just the extraordinary high costs if you ignore a problem that is potentially headed your way. We know that human antibiotics are, with every passing year, becoming fewer and fewer because of the growth of resistance so it’s absolutely imperative that we act, and the impact of being unprepared for the pandemic I think reinforces the importance of acting before it’s too late. And it may seem very costly to do all this research now but it’s nothing on the cost of failure to act.”

Adding:

“Every time you have surgery, the biggest risk is infection, so you get an antibiotic to prevent that. Imagine if you couldn’t prevent infection, it would be cataclysmic for so many surgeries.”

Professor Walsh, who will be one of the lead researchers at the new institute the Ineos gift will fund shows no less urgency in his appraisal of the risk of antibiotics resistance:

“We have run out of time. This is a national emergency and international crisis.”

Scientists around the world are working on the challenge of developing new generations of antibiotics. The focus of the new Oxford Institute will be on antibiotics used in agriculture, where the majority are used on animals. It’s in agricultural settings that bacteria are evolving resistance to antibiotics. They can then infect humans with catastrophic consequences.

The Ineos Oxford institute’s focus on animal antibiotics is a decision informed by the strategy of developing agriculture-only antibiotics. That will allow ‘human antibiotics’ to be reserved for humans only. That would be expected to hugely increase the amount of time that bacteria would need to evolve resistance, ‘buying time’, for the next wonder drug to be discovered.

David Sweetman, a surgeon (presumably the friend who first alerted Sir Ratcliff to the issue) and adviser to the new Ineos Oxford Institute added a hopeful note to the commentary, with:

“If there is any positive lesson to be taken from the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve clearly seen that the only way out of such infectious disease crises is through brilliant scientific groundwork, laid well in advance. The vaccines which have been created in record time and which offer light at the end of the tunnel were developed using research conducted long before Covid-19 struck”.

“It’s clear that we must be looking right now for new antibiotics with the same urgency as we have been for vaccines. The consequence of continued complacency doesn’t bear thinking about.”