AMR Science-Policy Forum 2026 review

Here is presented a summarised version, you can read the full report from John Rex here.

ESCMID Global once again held an afternoon of sessions focused on the intersection of AMR-related science and policy. With an overall theme of “Smart policies for lean times,” the well-attended afternoon comprised a pair of workshops, a plenary session, and a networking reception 

The afternoon’s parallel workshops were evidence-focused:

• Evidence for policy: modelling and economics
• Innovation for action: diagnostics and cost-effectiveness across the product development and implementation pathway

After the workshops, the plenary (opened by Robert Skov and then chaired by Jon Friedland) featured:

• (opening comments) Hon. Minister Mekdes Daba, Global Leaders Group on AMR, and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General
• (keynote) “AMR policy action under pressure: doing more with less”: Naomi Rupasinghe (World Bank, Washington, USA)
• “Efficient and effective IPC”: Benedetta Allegranzi (WHO Regional Office for The Eastern Mediterranean, Cairo, Egypt)
• “Prevention pays off: vaccination policies for AMR” by Padmini Srikantiah (Gates Foundation, Seattle, USA)
• “Global AWaRe targets and national cost savings“: Koen Pouwels (University of Oxford, Oxford, UK)
• “A gram of prevention or a kilo of cure?“: Javier Yugueros-Marcos (World Organisation for Animal Health, Paris, France)

Naomi Rupasinghe’s keynote focused on the ways that she has been working from the World Bank to create workable investment opportunities in AMR. Her talk showed the path forward in AMR with an example from the vaccine world where the IFFIm (International Finance Facility for Immunisation) leveraged long-term pledges from 11 sovereign governments to raise $6.2b from the capital markets and immunise 233m children.

WHO’s Benedetta Allegranzi summarised the progress made in developing and implementing best practices for IPC. In 2023, there was the release of the WHO’s Global Strategy on IPC and then in 2025 the release of a practical guide to development and implementation of national action plans for infection prevention and control.

Padmini Srikantiah, Deputy Director at the Gates Foundation, epxlored the impact of vaccines. She noted that existing vaccines alone would annually avert 106k deaths, 9.1m DALYs, US$861m in hospital costs, and US$5.9b in productivity losses. She also highlighted the durability of vaccines showing that only a few of the vaccines end with a documented resistance-related failure in humans and even then, it takes many years for resistance to develop to vaccines as compared to often relatively prompt resistance to the drugs.

Koen Pouwels, reviewed his research on the value of adjusting prescribing patterns so that usage in the Access category of the WHO AWaRe (Access-Watch-Reserve) antibiotic ranking hits the UNGA HLM-AMR target of ~70%. Based on modelling that grouped regions by socio-demographic factors and infection patterns, substantial savings were possible.

Javier Yugueros-Marcos (World Organisation for Animal Health) reminded us that AMR is already causing $17b in annual GDP losses in livestock production with the potential for the cost to rise to $159b annually by 2050 if no action is taken. Building on a classic concept with his title “A gram of prevention or a kilo of cure,” he showed the potential for modern interventions to have a huge impact.

Finally, WHO’s Jean Pierre Nyemazi closed the session by first reviewing the political work that brought us to the 2024 UNGA HLM on AMR followed by a discussion of what is coming for IPEA (the Independent Panel on Evidence for Action as well as updates to the Global Action Plan (GAP) on AMR.

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