Once again we jumped into challenging and important project. The relevancy of this topic is illustrated by the ongoing World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW). A less known but threatening problem of today is the increasing common antibiotic resistance of organisms within humans and animals. If attitudes do not change, current trends suggest that infections caused by multi-drug resistant pathogens due to ineffective medicines could become one of the leading causes of human death by 2050, overtaking cancer as the No 1 leading cause of death, according to WHO estimates. E-Group has entered this battle with its recently launched new project, the Animal Health Innovation Platform.
There are many different livestock farms around the world, and keeping these crowded animal farms healthy is often difficult. Unfortunately, frequent antibiotic usage in livestock farming is a common practice, and often results in unnecessary doses of antibiotics. They are partially or entirely absorbed by the food products, including human food, contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance. Inappropriately applied antibiotics do not kill all pathogens, additionally, the more potent ones are even able to multiply, unfortunately often become resistant to the original drug.
If we look at a health-related problem in its complexity, which threatens the health of people, animals and the environment, it is worth looking at it holistically, taking into consideration all the factors. This is the so-called One Health approach, which was also adopted by the European Union years ago. Drug repositioning opens up new possibilities in the development of medicine for animals, it can make a major contribution to an effective solution for this problem. Drug repositioning is the use of a previously authorized medicine in other therapeutic areas. To develop a new compound against antibiotic resistance with drug-repositioning is much less risky, costly and time-consuming than a new drug innovation, which starts with a new chemical entity and goes through the full development cycle.
The three-year project ’Development Of Anti-Bacterial Resistance Product In Veterinary Medicine, Development Of A Supporting Response Platform’ started on the 1st of October 2021. It was launched in a consortium of the University of Veterinary Medicine Budapest and E-Group, with the support of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office. The project aims to create an innovative drug repositioning platform for animal health. Within the project framework, E-Group will provide technological and data infrastructure expertise, including, data engineering and data science. The platform’s operation will be similar to the highly successful InnoHealth DataLake. The drug repositioning platform for animal health will be able to integrate and perform complex analysis of animal health, veterinary public health, food safety and human health data from different sources. The platform can be used to identify multiple candidate agents to combat veterinary antibiotic resistance. As part of the One Health concept, the platform could also form the basis for a food chain safety data platform to be developed in the future.