Yesterday US HHS announced a new global partnership to fund pre-clinical antibiotic R&D, coordinated by the Boston University School of Law. The partnership is known as CARB-X, which is the abbreviation for the Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (CARB) Biopharmaceutical Accelerator. CARB-X is the culmination of one key part of the US National Action Plan on antibiotic resistance. Background paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.
Under the grant, BU Law will coordinate more than $350 million in new funds for R&D over the next five years, in partnership with BARDA, NIAID, the Wellcome Trust, the AMR Centre, MassBio, the California Life Sciences Institute and the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT. Kevin Outterson is the PI and Executive Director of CARB-X.
While the bulk of the project funds pre-clinical R&D, we are also interested in the role of law, IP and other innovation incentives, using the unique dataset that CARB-X will generate.