Klebsiella pneumonia bacteria (CDC.gov)
27 May 2015. A coalition of health care providers, academic labs, and a pharmaceutical company formed an organization to develop a common research platform for countering multi-drug aesistant infections. The group known as Share ID — short for sharing hospital data to advance research and enhance patient care in infectious diseases — is underwritten by specialty drug maker Actavis and managed by Hitlab, a health care consulting organization.
Share ID aims to collect and analyze data on infectious diseases from participating hospitals to better understand the scale and dimensions of drug-resistant infections, and undertake studies to identify solutions. The alliance says it plans to quantify burdens associated with illnesses resulting from multi-drug resistant pathogens, build tools to help improve treatment decision-making, and conduct comparative-effectiveness research to find productive treatments for patients with these infections.
Share ID says its first targets are gram-negative infections identified by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the most urgent threats to public health. “Gram-negative” refers to a classification for bacteria where the microbes either retain (gram-positive) or shed (gram-negative) a test stain on their protective cell coatings. Gram-negative bacteria are increasingly resistant to antibiotics and cause many infections found in health care settings, including pneumonia, bloodstream infections, wound or surgical site infections, and meningitis.
CDC named carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae or CRE as a particular problem. CRE is a family of bacteria including Klebsiella and Escherichia coli (E. coli). CRE infections happen most often with patients requiring devices such as catheters and ventilators, or those requiring long courses of antibiotics.
Share ID’s steering committee is made up of academic and hospital researchers, with representatives from Actavis and Hitlab. The group says health systems taking part in Share ID will gain valuable evidence-based insights from real world data.
“Hospitals participating in this effort will be able to benchmark their experience against that of other organizations while also helping to identify how to better treat patients grappling with these deadly infections,” says James McKinnell, an infectious diseases specialist at Harbor UCLA Medical Center and Torrance Memorial Medical Center, as well as co-chair of the steering committee, in an Actavis statement.
Actavis, in Parsippany, New Jersey (with corporate headquarters in Dublin, Ireland), is a developer of specialty and generic medications covering a range of disease areas, including infectious diseases. In March, the company completed acquisition of drug maker Allergan, and plans to change its corporate name to Allergan, pending shareholder approval.
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