Brendan Smith Raises WHO Role in Global Sepsis Research Funding

Thank you very much, Aghaeulig, and I endorse wholeheartedly your concluding remarks, Aghaeulig. Could I just ask, and Sinead, you've been a powerful and are a powerful advocate in relation to this very, very important topic, and you're honouring extremely well the memory of your sister-in-law and putting the interests of other people first, which is a great credit to you and to your family as well. Could I just ask Professor Kerrigan, what lead is the World Health Organization taking on this? The last time I read some documentation or some report that the WHO had talked about the next pandemic would be loneliness, so they did. Now, as well as that, there is a commissioner in Europe who has some responsibility for health. It's a national competence, so it is, understandably. But has that directorate in Europe, are they pulling anything together? Are they driving forward the need for a strategy that would be suitable for every country? You're at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland doing exceptionally good research on that. Are you doing work with counterparts in other countries, be it in Northern Ireland or across in Britain or in any of the member states of the European Union or the states or whatever? I assume that at research level, that at clinical level, in the whole area of healthcare, that there's collaboration, research going on, that research is being shared or whatever. But is there nobody driving this globally? Thank you, Oka Heerle. There is. And from my own research in RCSI, I'm connected with the US, many countries in Europe, Australia, Asia. So a lot of countries are working together on this. I think there's a real recognition that it's not going to be one person or one country that solves this. It's going to have to be cross-country development. Again, the problem is it's funding. It's research funding. It's just so difficult to get. No matter what region you're in, America is very difficult right now. Europe does have funding, but not specific for sepsis. So trying to do that research, there's definitely an appetite for everyone to work together. And a lot of people in this area, because the sepsis area is actually quite small, everybody knows everybody. We're all backed by the research that we do at the Global Sepsis Alliance with the World Health Organization. So they're all aware of this, but the World Health Organization, for example, doesn't have money, so they can't give money for research. But they can advocate on behalf of the researchers to say, we're going to run into trouble here if we run out of antibiotics, so you need to fund this area. So they can't put so much pressure on government organizations to provide that money for that kind of research. And the pharma companies, you know, I assume I'm accurate in that during the COVID, as I mentioned earlier on, there was an investment by governments. There was an investment by the pharma companies to get vaccines. Presumably, pharma companies in regard to antibiotics and antimicrobial research, that they're putting resources into it, but obviously not to the extent that's needed or not with the urgency that's needed. Would that be accurate? Yeah, so it's been long known that sepsis research, drug development, it's a graveyard. There has never, ever been a drug approved for sepsis. Never. We use antibiotics to control the infection, but there has never been a drug to treat sepsis because it's too complicated. And I personally don't buy that. I think we know an awful lot more now about sepsis. And I definitely see that there are targets worth chasing. But pharma, large pharma, have been bitten too many times by trying to develop drugs for sepsis, and they didn't work. That they step back from it now, and they're expecting academic institutions to take a drug, identify a drug, take it through a preclinical trial, and actually almost get into human clinical trials before they would get involved, because they've been bitten so badly from it. And that's not the way they should be working, because a third-level institution does not have money to take a drug into a human clinical trial. You're talking about hundreds of millions. So that's where more, I suppose, pressure has to come on the likes of the EU or in America, wherever, to provide that money for interesting new targets that are coming out that may work. And understand that it's not just all about antibiotics and antimicrobials. The host, the body, reacts in a way it shouldn't. So if you can find a way to calm the body down, the infection should be able to look after itself. I can hear the European Union, to its credit, in the past, I'm not as familiar now as I was. I served as Minister of Agriculture 2008-2011. At that time, with the whole area of agriculture, fisheries, and food, we were drawing down very substantial funding from the Horizon Programme. For research and development across the whole food, marine area and that, the European Union had a very, very strong research programme that time. And it would have been available for health-related projects as well. I'm not up to date with it at the moment. I don't know if it's as strong as it used to be. I sincerely hope it is, and I presume that. And again, to your knowledge, Professor Kerrigan, as the Directorate for Health in the European Commission, are they providing any leadership, to your knowledge, on this? They definitely do. And the European Commissioner attends the European Sepsis Alliance. And they give a talk, and they recognise the problem. They recognise the struggle. They recognise where this could lead to. And they do try their best to influence health spending and increased research funding from that angle. And that does lead back into Horizon. And Horizon is still going. Horizon is still strong. But again, even though we, and we have lobbied for a specific sepsis call, not antimicrobial resistance or infection-related or host therapies, we have lobbied for a specific sepsis call, and it didn't make the cut. So we have done that. And we definitely are not the only ones who have done that. It just doesn't seem to get past the powers that approve that, to be a specific Horizon call for sepsis. Now, there are the European Innovation Council do have calls every now and again for around that. But it can be non-specific in the call for vaccine candidates, which kind of gets mixed up in it, when that's not really what we need to do here. We need to have a very specific call for new targets for sepsis. Sincere thanks to Sinead and Steve for their outstanding contribution here today in creating that awareness with us. And hopefully we can advocate, this committee will advocate, on what you have outlined for us that needs to be done as strongly as we can. Absolutely. Thank you.