Ashoka University Wins the Innovation Award for the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Data Challenge

Innovation Award for the Antimicrobial Resistance: As one of the five winners of the Vivli AMR Surveillance Open Data Re-use Data Challenge, Ashoka University announced today that they had been chosen. The university’s research team was one of the award winners after a careful review. Their work, “Novel Approach to Antibiogram Analysis: Looking at the Composite Resistance Phenotype,” has great potential to further our understanding of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

AMR happens when bacteria and fungi, for example, learn to resist the therapeutic medications that are meant to kill them, becoming more deadlier as a result. The World Health Organisation (WHO) lists it as one of the top 10 worldwide public health concerns, making it a serious threat to humanity. AMR infections may be the leading cause of death worldwide by 2050, highlighting how urgent it is to solve this problem.

In 2022, Vivli and Wellcome introduced the AMR Register, a cutting-edge platform with industrial datasets that combines surveillance data for the benefit of academics, in response to this urgent challenge. The Wellcome-funded AMR Data Challenge was introduced in April 2023 to spur creativity and assist the creative repurposing of the vast amount of surveillance data found in the AMR Register. This year, a total of 56 teams representing 28 different nations took part in the challenge.

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Ashoka University Wins the Innovation Award for the Antimicrobial Resistance

The majority of AMR research usually focuses on how individual medications interact with particular bacteria. The team from Ashoka University expanded on this strategy. The team was led by Ashoka University Research Faculty Fellow Shraddha Karve, who stated, “The strength of this analysis resides in its holistic approach to studying resistance. We suggested that rather than focusing on a particular drug-bug combination, it would be more useful to consider antibiotic resistance as a composite quality. It’s similar to the story of the elephant and the blind men in that everyone’s interpretation of the situation will be drastically different if they each simply touch a small portion of the animal.

By linking composite resistance patterns to climate factors like precipitation and temperature, the scientists also demonstrated the notion. Their findings highlighted how crucial climatic factors are to the occurrence of resistance patterns.

There were five researchers on the team. Shraddha Karve, Rintu Kutum, Vasundhara Karthikeyan, Ragul Natrajan, and Devojit Sharma from the ICMR NIREH, Bhopal, are four of the participants from Ashoka University.

“Ashoka University’s accomplishment in this international data challenge demonstrates the institution’s commitment to improving scientific understanding and tackling issues of global health. Additionally, it highlights how crucial open science is to finding solutions to complicated issues like AMR. In order to contribute to a healthier future for all, we look forward to continuing our work on issues like AMR, stated Professor Somak Raychaudhury, Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University.

In addressing the global AMR epidemic, the Vivli AMR Register has been essential. Leading pharmaceutical firms like GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Shionogi, Paratek, and Venatorx share crucial surveillance data with it. Researchers may identify trends in multidrug resistance across time, advise policy, and predict future trends in resistance thanks to the open exchange of industry data through this single platform.