€1m prize for diagnostic test to combat antibiotic resistance

The European Commission has announced that a prize of €1m is to be awarded to the person or team that develops a rapid test to tell whether a patient needs to be treated with antibiotics or not.

It is intended to prevent the overuse of antibiotics and halt the growing resistance of micro-organisms to them that causes 25,000 deaths every year and over €1.5bn in healthcare expenses and productivity losses in Europe.

This test would let doctors know whether patients with upper respiratory tract infections can be treated safely without antibiotics. Antibiotics are frequently prescribed for these infections despite many being due to viruses, where antibiotics are neither effective nor necessary.

The Horizon Prize was created to stop patients taking antibiotics needlessly, which is one of the main reasons for the rise of antimicrobial resistance. It is one of five innovation prizes being launched this year under Horizon 2020.

European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas said: “Growing resistance to antibiotics is one of the biggest challenges to public health today. We need to find new ways to prevent people from dying from infections that have been treatable for decades, until resistance rendered our drugs ineffective. We need to bring new classes of antibiotics to market and we need to take preventative measures to stop antibiotics being over-prescribed and over-used. Under Horizon 2020 we are continuing to help save lives and reduce the €1.5bn in healthcare expenses and productivity losses the EU incurs each year from drug-resistant infections.”

Applicants can submit their entries from 10 March 2015 until 17 August 2016.