Associated organisationsKEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme · Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine · Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit · University of Ghana · University of Ibadan · University of OxfordEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£3.8M
PeriodApr 2021 — Sept 2024
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
A network of hospitals and clinics across Asia and Africa will collect patient data alongside lab results to track how antibiotic resistance develops in real-world infections. This matters because current global surveillance systems often lack the clinical detail needed to guide treatment decisions. Many hospitals in low-resource settings cannot link a patient’s infection, their risk factors, and the drugs that work or fail against it. Without that link, doctors prescribe antibiotics blindly, and health ministries cannot set evidence-based treatment guidelines. The ACORN project fills this gap by providing simple digital tools for data collection, visualisation, and analysis that any participating lab can use. If successful, ACORN could transform how local hospitals use their own microbiology data—for example, by identifying high-risk patients or updating empiric treatment protocols based on local resistance patterns. On a larger scale, the network would feed into international surveillance efforts with data that reflects real patient outcomes, not just lab results. The project’s focus on clinician engagement and stakeholder collaboration aims to make global AMR monitoring meaningful from the ground up, rather than a top-down reporting exercise.
View original technical description
The ACORN project will establish a network of hospitals and clinical laboratories in Asia and Africa to implement efficient patient-focused antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance. Network data will be used to determine AMR disease burden, risk factors, and patient and economic impacts for key clinical syndromes and associated pathogens. ACORN will address the need for better systems for linked clinical and microbiology data analysis to enable clinicians and ministries of health to understand and respond to the locally and nationally relevant AMR challenges and to engage meaningfully with international surveillance efforts. ACORN will provide simple to use data collection, visualisation, and analysis tools along with a framework for sites to improve clinician utilisation of diagnostic microbiology resources. Targeted clinical and outcome data collection will enable local use of pathogen and antimicrobial susceptibility data, for example by identification of high-risk patients and for development of empiric treatment guidelines. Global AMR surveillance and mitigation endeavours are weakened as a result of limited active healthcare provider engagement via local data use. Project engagement efforts will focus on promotion of widespread adoption of ACORN, through collaborative links with key AMR stakeholders, to ensure that future global surveillance has meaning, from the ground up.
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