Monitoring, management and combating antimicrobial resistance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has emerged as one of the most urgent threats to global public health, undermining decades of progress in infectious disease control. This FEBS Advanced Lecture Course is designed for early-stage researchers from industry and academia and explores the multidisciplinary aspects of AMR, from monitoring and surveillance and molecular mechanisms to the design and development of targeted strategies.

The programme opens by framing the scale of the crisis, translating surveillance data into strategic health priorities and quantifying the global burden of bacterial resistance with modern AMR monitoring tools. A substantial part addresses the biology of resistance and persistence: biomaterial-associated infections, biofilm formation on microplastics, bacterial stress-response systems and the signalling pathways governing survival in opportunistic pathogens such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Novel molecular targets are also explored, including bacterial G-quadruplexes as emerging drug targets and bioisostere-based approaches to antimicrobial design.

The course then covers next-generation therapeutic strategies designed to circumvent traditional resistance mechanisms: light-activated porphyrin-based photosensitizers, smart nanosystems for targeted antimicrobial delivery, adjuvant therapy platforms for high-throughput screening, immunotherapies against bacterial infections and magisterial phage therapy as a clinical alternative to conventional antibiotics. Sessions on host–pathogen interactions, from advanced infection-modelling platforms to pathogen–immune dynamics in paediatric populations, provide mechanistic insight for drug discovery, giving participants an integrated view of how surveillance data, molecular biology and translational innovation shape future infection control and antimicrobial stewardship.