Philippe Guérin Suggests Data Management Could Support Antibiotic Resistance Research

Philippe Guérin, Executive Director at WWARN, recently wrote an article published by the French newspaper Le Figaro (17th May) suggesting that there could be some potential to replicate the WWARN approach to gather, standardise and analyse data on a large and comprehensive scale in order to improve antibiotic resistance surveillance.

Resistance to antibiotics remains a major public health concern, confounded by ever-increasing passenger air travel and cross-border migratory patterns which are revealing new illnesses and new forms of bacterial survival rates following antibiotic treatment. Despite these trends, clinicians, researchers and policy-makers continue to struggle to access and analyse reliable, consistent and sufficiently detailed data in order to compare results across different stakeholder groups and countries.

The malarial research community faces similar challenges, in particular in the field of antimalarial resistance. WWARN, created in 2008, is responding to some of these issues through the development of collaborative scientific study groups together with data standardisation, curation and analysis tools. Freely accessible to all, innovative online tools such as the Parasite Clearance Estimator, In Vitro Analysis and Reporting Tool (IVART) and WWARN Explorer are helping to capture, consolidate and compare data across multiple antimalarial disciplines (pharmacology, clinical, molecular and in vitro), research groups and countries.

If you are a French-speaker you can read more from Philippe Guérin in the Le Figaro.