Active Infection & Immunity Public Health & Healthcare

Phase 2 of the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Project

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University of Oxford
Funding £2.7M
Period Oct 2023 — Oct 2026

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Every year, drug-resistant infections kill more people than HIV and malaria combined — but no one has a precise, up-to-date count for every country. The GRAM Project’s first phase produced the largest global dataset on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) ever assembled, yet it left large gaps: whole regions and many infection types were poorly covered. This second phase aims to fill those gaps by expanding the network of collaborators and acquiring targeted data from missing areas. The core problem is that without reliable, country-level estimates, governments and health agencies cannot track whether resistance is rising or falling, or target interventions effectively. If successful, GRAM-2 will integrate AMR burden estimation into the permanent Global Burden of Disease framework, producing regular, sustainable updates. This would give policymakers in low- and middle-income countries — where the toll is highest — the numbers they need to allocate antibiotics, fund surveillance labs, and design treatment guidelines. The work is fundamentally about measurement and infrastructure: making a hidden crisis visible, year after year, so that decisions are based on data rather than guesswork.

View original technical description
The first iteration of the GRAM project represented the single largest assembly of global data on AMR but contained significant gaps geographically and in some cases by some infectious syndromes for example. The first priority is to consolidate the global burden estimation of AMR and integrate it into the global burden of disease enterprise so that it can be produced on a regular basis, and to make that process of integration of the estimation of AMR a sustainable ongoing process. Furthermore, better coverage of data through an expanded network of collaborators and targeted acquisition of data to fill key gaps will help produce improved estimates of the public health and clinical burden caused by drug resistant infections and help address the most important data gaps identified in GRAM-1. In order to fully utilise the data, there is a need to maximise the value of the investment and provide increasingly robust estimates on the burden of AMR, at country level over time. Continued analysis with more data will also help us better understand differences between countries, or over time regarding the impact of AMR. This application contributes to shared activities for GRAM-2 and will be jointly funded by DHSC.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Ben Cooper (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Mapping and monitoring the global burden of antimicrobial-resistance/drug-resistant infections
Rethinking How to Understand the Burden of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria: establishing best-practice through comparative analyses
AMRnet
A Clinically Oriented Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (ACORN)
Global Response Against Superbugs and Pathogens

Original classification

Discretionary Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.