The £ 10 million Longitude Prize, run by innovation foundation Nesta, was announced in 2013 by UK Prime Minister David Cameron as a step towards conserving antibiotics for future generations. Recently Mr Daniel Berman, Lead, Longitude Prize, was in India to attend a series of workshops for creating awareness about the Prize among startups in various cities. In a freewheeling discussion with the BioVoice News, Daniel talked about the steps taken by Nesta to help Indian innovators to speed up their R & D to develop affordable diagnostic solutions. Read his detailed insights below:
BY RAHUL KOUL
Why has the Longitudinal Prize worth £ 10 million kept only for diagnostic products that offer solution to antibiotic resistance?
face to face
“ Good to find India well represented in fight against anti-microbial resistance”
The £ 10 million Longitude Prize, run by innovation foundation Nesta, was announced in 2013 by UK Prime Minister David Cameron as a step towards conserving antibiotics for future generations. Recently Mr Daniel Berman, Lead, Longitude Prize, was in India to attend a series of workshops for creating awareness about the Prize among startups in various cities. In a freewheeling discussion with the BioVoice News, Daniel talked about the steps taken by Nesta to help Indian innovators to speed up their R & D to develop affordable diagnostic solutions. Read his detailed insights below:
BY RAHUL KOUL
Why has the Longitudinal Prize worth £ 10 million kept only for diagnostic products that offer solution to antibiotic resistance?
Yes, the focus is antimicrobial resistance and as you know, globally there is a crisis as there are only few antibiotics left with no or little resistance. It is a fact now that for most of the respiratory diseases including TB, the 70 percent of antibiotics don’ t work. These people have viral infections and the antibiotics don’ t do anything. There are less and less antibiotics to turn to. The problem today is that these is no test that is affordable, available, sensitive or specific enough. We are looking for a test with high sensitivity to infections.
There is a risk that we are going to the preantibiotic era. There would be crisis in the longer run where surgeries such as Cesarean operations would become difficult because of not enough antibiotics to prevent infection. Any other surgery too would become difficult life threatening. In case of oncology,
40 BioVoiceNews | August 2017