ANR PPR Antibiotic Resistance: Understand, Innovate, Act

Funding is available to researchers in France for multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary projects that seek to understand and prevent the spread of antibiotic resistance. 

The Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR – National Research Agency) was first established in 2005 and is governed by the French Ministry of Research. It provides funding to public research organisations and universities, as well as to private companies, for both basic and applied research in all fields of science. Its goals include promoting creativity and openness as well as new ideas and partnerships, in particular between academia and industry. It also seeks to improve the competitiveness of French research in Europe and around the world.

In line with the WHO global action plan on antimicrobial resistance and the 2016 French inter-ministerial roadmap on antibiotic resistance, the French Government launched a Programme prioritaire de recherche (PPR – Priority Research Programme) on the topic. With a budget of €40 million over 10 years, the programme forms part of the France 2030 investment plan. The key objectives of the PPR are to:

• Elucidate and prevent the emergence, transmission and spread of genetic elements of resistance (including those involving biocides) and highly resistant bacteria.
• Refine and evaluate new tools, methods or strategies to improve the appropriateness of antibiotic prescriptions and the measures limiting transmission of resistant bacteria in order to control the emergence and spread of bacterial resistance and its effects within a One Health perspective.
• Understand the anthropological, sociological and economic parameters that lead to incorrect usage of antibiotics and to the transmission and diffusion of antibiotic resistance.
• Identify and develop diagnostic, therapeutic and preventive innovations while respecting commensal flora and non-targeted bacterial ecosystems. 

France remains an over-consumer of antibiotics and multi-resistance to antibiotics is a significant public health issue in the country. All areas of medicine linked to infection risk are affected, including surgery, onco-haematology and organ transplantation. In many medical disciplines, doctors are already dealing with patients at a therapeutic impasse. To halt the progression of this problem, the objective of the current ANR call for proposals is to bring together the expertise of communities of scientists from different backgrounds to address preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic needs for innovation, to lead towards an improved usage of antibiotics and to open up new research pathways to better combat antimicrobial resistance. The call intends to fund interdisciplinary, ambitious, structuring projects that bring together different types of research (basic, environmental, clinical, translational, public health etc) relating to the health of humans, animals and ecosystems. 

In 2020, a first call for proposals was launched with the following four challenges:

• Challenge 1: Dynamics and control of the emergence, transmission and dissemination of antibiotic resistance.
• Challenge 2: Optimising the use of antibiotics in human and veterinary medicine.
• Challenge 3: Individual, ethnological and sociological, economic, political and cultural determinants of antibiotic resistance.
• Challenge 4: Therapeutic innovation.

The current call for proposals aims to promote interdisciplinary projects, particularly those using a One Health approach and employing digital technology, in order to better understand the origins and combat the development of resistance. As a priority, the call is seeking to strengthen research in the least explored fields, particularly with regards to the health of ecosystems and the mechanisms associated with the emergence and selection of resistances and with transmission between the sectors as well as the discovery of new mechanisms to target to develop new treatments. Projects including a digital strategy and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to predict the sensitivity of medications based on genomic data and/or projects aiming to improve the control and monitoring of infections associated with care and to the correct usage of antibiotics by developing prevention and support tools for the prescription of antibiotics are encouraged.

Research projects involving the humanities and social science, data science and/or involving the French overseas territories are encouraged. The call also welcomes research in the following disciplines: life sciences; human and veterinary medicine; mathematics; physics; informatics; chemistry; engineering sciences. Multi- and interdisciplinary projects are of particular interest.