AMR Advocate Delivers Inaugural Gabriel Leung Lecture
A global advocate for antimicrobial resistance delivered the inaugural Gabriel Leung Lecture calling for greater collaboration to battle the “grand pandemic” of superbugs.
Professor Dame Sally Davies, Master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge and the UK Government Special Envoy on Antimicrobial Resistance, was invited to deliver the first lecture in the series in October.
The lectures were created in honour of Professor Gabriel Leung, HKUMed’s 40th Dean of Medicine, who stepped down from the role in 2022.
Almost 80 people from across disciplines and professions donated to support the new lectures, which will be held every two years.
Dame Sally’s lecture, titled “Saving our planet from the grand pandemic of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)”, explored the scale of the problem and the opportunities to address it.
Antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria, fungi, virus and parasites mutate and become resistant to medicines used to treat infections, such as antibiotics and antivirals. Misuse and overuse of antimicrobials such as antibiotics accelerates AMR.
These bugs are not only found in people. They occur in farm animals thanks to the use of antibiotics for growth promotion, as well as leaking into the environment through sewage.
“AMR is a science problem but it’s also a behavioural problem, and we have to think about the behavioural issues when we think about use [of antibiotics]”, Dame Sally said.
During her time as Chief Medical Officer for England, Dame Sally co-led a worldwide campaign against AMR that culminated in 193 countries agreeing to take steps to combat the problem through a UN declaration.
Highlighting the scale of the AMR “grand pandemic”, the lecture touched on the burden of drug resistant infections, which killed 1.3 million people in 2019.
Despite the greater attention on AMR in recent years, the global health expert said patchy data masks its true toll.
“If you look at the patients and people who’ve died with AMR as an underlying cause, you get this shocking figure that we were all surprised by that it’s the third-most important underlying cause of death after heart disease and stroke,” she said.
Another challenge to addressing AMR is the empty antibiotic pipeline.
Dame Sally said she is concerned that just five of the 12 antibiotics developed in the past decade are still progressing.
“We’ve not had coming into routine clinical practice new drugs that are really new and innovative since really the 1990s and much before. So this is a big worry to me.”
She explained that pharmaceutical companies are focused on developing profitable oncology drugs over new antibiotics that would be used sparingly and would bring in less money.
In Britain, the UK Pull Incentive Model is designed to solve this challenge and spur drug development.
Its Netflix-like subscription model assesses the societal value of a new drug and signs up to use as little or as much of the medicine over a number of years. Similar pilots are in place in Japan and Germany.
Two new drugs are now in development under this model for the UK.
“We calculated how much we were prepared to spend on each contract on our GDP related to the G7 and G20,” she said. “Because we know how much money’s needed, how many drugs are needed, so you can work out how much is our fair share.”
To aid the battle against AMR, Dame Sally wants to see firm targets, accountability mechanisms for countries, and greater public and political momentum.
She called for the founding of an independent panel on AMR modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“We need to have action plans, that I would call One Health, that encompass the human use, the animal use, environmental issues and bring it all together,” she said. “It is extraordinarily difficult and we are not winning.”
Dr Leong Che-hung, a leading figure in the healthcare sector in Hong Kong, initiated the fundraising drive for the Gabriel Leung Lectures and headed the fundraising committee.
The lectures aim to invite prominent scholars, academicians and practitioners from institutions around the world.
These visitors from universities and medical and health science centres will be invited to give talks at HKUMed to facilitate knowledge exchange for students, researchers, scholars and the general public.
