CARB-X Funds New Technologies to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance

Betsy Wonderly Trainor, Alliance Director for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria (CARB-X), sat down with Contagion to discuss CARB-X’s mission and new sponsored projects.

Wonderly Trainor gave the presentation, “Innovative Technologies: Fighting AMR” at the 2021 World Anti-Microbial Resistance Congress last week. During her talk, she highlighted various technologies in CARB-X’s portfolio.

Wonderly Trainor has a broad interest in infectious disease, and worked to support development and commercialization of drugs to combat viral diseases before joining CARB-X. She said there is a lot of overlap in the product development for bacterial and viral diseases.

“Antibiotic resistance is becoming more and more of a problem as the days go on, and so I think making sure that we’re planning ahead, and we have the tools that we need when we need them…hopefully to help prevent the problem from getting any worse.”

She said a primary function of CARB-X is “looking at the infrastructure that’s in place and how we can best leverage that for multiple disease areas.”

CARB-X is still in its first 5 years of funding and is currently in negotiations for future funding, and Wonderly Trainor said, “We are hopeful that the companies that are currently in the portfolio will be successful, and we will see a lot of novel technology coming out across the 3 pillars of antibiotics, preventatives, and diagnostics…I’m excited about some of the new initiatives that we might have coming out in the future.”