Diagnostic stewardship & innovative diagnostic tools

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a major healthcare threat with increasingly high morbidity and mortality on a global scale. As of 2019, AMR-related infections were the leading cause of death, even surpassing HIV/AIDS and Malaria¹. One major driver of AMR is the inappropriate use, mostly overuse, of antimicrobials. This can largely be explained by the dilemma to correctly establish infectious disease etiology on clinical grounds alone, which results in a huge proportion of antibiotics given “just-in-case”. IMMH is trying to address this topic by promoting Diagnostic stewardship, performing Translational Microbiome Research and testing the in vitro and in vivo efficacy of novel drug candidates against multidrug-resistant bacteria.

¹Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators. 2022. Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis. Lancet 399:629-655. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02724-0.