Completed Infection & Immunity Public Health & Healthcare

Other infectious diseases of global public health significance

Funder MRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation University College London Source-published name: University College London
Funding £3.4M
Period Mar 2015 — Dec 2021

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A single course of antibiotics for pneumonia could be cut short, and a four-week treatment for hepatitis C might replace the standard twelve-week regimen. This research tackles three overlapping crises: antibiotic resistance, expensive hepatitis C drugs, and the threat of global influenza pandemics. Shorter antibiotic courses could reduce the selective pressure that drives resistance, while repurposing older antibiotics offers a cheap weapon against hospital superbugs. For hepatitis C, where current oral cures work in over 90% of patients but cost too much for widespread use, even shorter treatment (four to six weeks) would slash costs and expand access. On influenza, the team is trialling a new treatment (FLU-IVIG) for severely ill hospitalised patients and studying how the virus evolves, aiming to predict who will fare worst. If successful, these changes would quietly reshape everyday medicine: pneumonia patients might recover faster with fewer side effects, hepatitis C could become treatable in low-income settings, and flu wards would have better tools to manage severe cases. The work on viral evolution also feeds directly into pandemic preparedness, helping health systems anticipate which flu strains pose the greatest threat.

View original technical description
Antibiotic resistance, viral hepatitis and infections which can cause a global epidemic such as influenza, place major burdens on human health. Our research focusses on the following: 1) Antibiotic resistance. One of objectives is to see if we can treat common infections such as pneumonia with shorter courses of antibiotics. Another is to see if using two antibiotics for a short time might improve outcomes when people have blood infections. Last, whether we can find new uses for older antibiotics that are no longer widely used but might be very effective for resistant bugs that have become more common in hospitals; 2) Hepatitis C. There are now several very well tolerated oral drugs which cure >90% of patients with Hepatitis C with just 12-24 weeks of treatment. However, they are very expensive and not widely available. We are planning a study to see if people can be cured with even shorter treatment courses of between 4-6 weeks. 3) Infections that ‘go global’. The 2009 ‘swine flu’ outbreak, only 6 years after SARS, reminded us of how important it is to prepare for global epidemics. We are part of two international influenza studies trying to understand how influenza changes over time and what factors predict who will do badly if they get flu. We are now trialling a new treatment (FLU-IVIG) for those severely ill, hospitalised with influenza.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Ann Walker (Principal Investigator)David Dunn (Co-Investigator)Ibrahim Abubakar (Co-Investigator)

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Original classification

Intramural

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