AMR Awareness Week 2025 Part 3: A success in the fight against antibiotic resistance

The global AMR Awareness Week aims to raise awareness of antibiotic resistance (AMR) and to promote solutions. This blog series provides an insight into the role of the pharmaceutical industry in the fight against AMR. The third and final part of the blog series focuses on the successful fight against AMR. The discovery of a completely new class of antibiotics has enabled the scientists at Roche to contribute to reducing the number of deaths worldwide from hospital-acquired bacterial infections.

Roche blog post for AMR awareness week 2025

Roche’s commitment to creating and developing researching and developing new medicines to tackle drug resistance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global health security challenge. In 2019, 1.27 million people died worldwide as a direct result of drug-resistant bacterial infections, and a total of 5 million people lost their lives as a result of disease linked to AMR — not including drug-resistant tuberculosis, which is also a significant cause of death. In addition, a lack of available effective antibiotics threatens modern medicine as we know it today. Without these critical therapeutics, basic preventive and life-saving procedures that we take for granted become impossible, and hospital-acquired infections can run rampant.

“Antimicrobial resistance affects everyone, but not everyone equally.”

Michael Lobritz (Head of Infectious Diseases at Roche Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED))

For example, patients with cancer are particularly susceptible to infection, and AMR is the leading cause of non-cancer mortality in these individuals.

With so much at stake, there’s a lot of work to be done. However, developing new classes of antibiotics is highly challenging, both economically and scientifically. Scientifically, bacteria are a challenge to crack. “Bacteria are very complicated creatures, protected by outer membranes so they can live in hostile environments,” Michael explains. “It’s complicated to get through that outer membranes, and we don’t understand it well.” For decades, researchers have struggled to develop new chemical classes to circumvent resistance. And when they do develop a new approach, they often face another major challenge: the high doses of medicine needed to be effective may not be sufficiently safe in humans.

Overcoming these hurdles requires a sustained commitment to new and inventive approaches, regardless of potential setbacks. Roche is providing just such a dedicated commitment to not one, but two teams of scientists, one in in Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED) in Basel, Switzerland, and one in Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED) in South San Francisco, California, USA, who are both delivering exciting novel classes of antibiotics, which are currently in clinical development and research approaches to replenish the antibiotics pipeline.

“We have unwavering support in the organisation for the importance of tackling antimicrobial resistance, which provides a strong foundation for our team. That gives us the opportunity to do something transformative.”

Man-Wah Tan (Vice President and Senior Fellow in Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED))

Each research unit takes a slightly different approach to developing new antibiotic therapies. pRED collaborates with academic scientists to engage young scientists on this problem and “scour the earth, searching high and low” for new chemical scaffolds for these medicines, Michael says. These molecules are tested in both traditional and novel screens to find the most promising candidates, generating a wealth of information, and a team of experts across functions dedicated to developing antibiotics helps design the molecules for maximum efficacy and safety.

Meanwhile, gRED is integrating traditional laboratory approaches with a new strategy: using AI to find new molecules even expert chemists might not have thought of, or that don’t exist in nature.  “By maintaining independent ways of approaching the problem, we don’t get into a herd mentality,” Man-Wah says. However, he points out that the collaboration between pRED and gRED is also crucial: “We share expertise and reagents between pRED and gRED, and in this hub, we can further enrich the performance of each group. The screens that pRED is advancing generate high-quality data we can use in our AI model. The ‘we’ is what makes us special.”

Michael agrees. “We can leverage this synergy, and the gRED AI ‘lab in a loop’ strategy can access chemical space far beyond our libraries. Combined, we have the most extensive safety, toxicology, and chemical data that we can use as a foundation, thanks to Roche’s long-term investment,” he added. Man-Wah also highlights Roche’s commitment to infectious diseases in diagnostics, with the development of diagnostics for common microbial infections such as Acinetobacter. “This is a tough business, and innovation does not move fast,” Michael summarises. “But we have a young portfolio, and the foundation of Roche’s commitment and support is a major driver behind our success.”

Click here for part 1 of the blog series

Click here for part 2 of the blog series