Student Impact Award
Student Team 13364: Justin Pymento (Team lead, University of Toronto), Archchana Arulananthan (McMaster University), Shahila Christie (Future Ethos, LLC), and Jiahui (Zoey) Zuo (University of Georgia)
Despite the approval of multiple new antibiotics since 2016, mortality from difficult-to-treat (DTR) Gram-negative infections has not improved, with predicted-ineffective initial therapy reaching 84% in 2023 (Walker et al., 2026). This clinical failure reflects a fundamental misalignment between where resistance is accelerating most rapidly and where innovation capital is deployed. No existing framework integrates real-world resistance acceleration with pipeline investment volume at a pathogen-drug level to produce actionable prioritization signals.
We will develop the Resistance-Innovation Gap Index (RIGI), an interpretable prioritization framework identifying potential gaps between resistance trends and therapeutic innovation. We will integrate MIC trend data from the Pfizer ATLAS, Paratek KEYSTONE, and Innoviva Acinetobacter baumannii datasets with the Global AMR R&D Funding Hub, focusing on three WHO-priority Gram-negative pathogen categories: Enterobacteriaceae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
Censoring-aware Gaussian mixture models will be applied to raw MIC distributions to estimate resistant-cluster membership, with classifications validated against source CLSI susceptibility interpretations. Mixed-effects models will then estimate longitudinal resistance trends, including continent-specific trends. A text-mining pipeline will be developed to classify Funding Hub projects by target organism to estimate documented public and philanthropic funding shares. These outputs form the RIGI: a two-tier framework comparing organism-level resistance trends with funding share and characterizing geographic variation. As the Funding Hub does not capture private-sector investment, RIGI reflects the publicly visible innovation landscape; private R&D remains a limitation and direction for future expansion.
RIGI will produce a transparent framework highlighting potential resistance-innovation gaps while preserving uncertainty and regional coverage. By translating surveillance data into actionable prioritization signals, RIGI can directly inform funders, product developers, WHO priority-setting processes, and national AMR action plans in guiding resources toward unmet antibacterial needs.