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