DanCARD Closed

The Dancard project was started in 2011 and closed around 2017

 

DanCARD history

The Danish Centre for Antibiotic Research and Development (DanCARD) was established as an interdisciplinary collaboration between 11 research groups with a shared vision of winning the battle against multi-resistant bacteria.
The birth of the centre was made possible by a six-year grant (DKK 31 mill) from the Danish Council for Strategic Research.

The main object of the DanCARD centre is to prevent further escalation of bacterial resistance and to increase our antibiotic armature. The centre will address this by developing new antibiotic drugs, sustain and increase the activity of available and novel antibiotics and finally search for alternative strategies to combat bacterial infections.

The DanCARD projects fall into four work packages with the following headings:

  • Work package 1: Development of novel antibiotics.

  • Work package 2: Improving pharmacological properties and delivery of available antibiotics or circumvention of resistance mechanisms.

  • Work package 3: Improving antibiotic activity against tolerant bacteria in biofilm, and strategies for reducing development of antibiotic resistance.

  • Work package 4: Development and validation of animal models for testing antimicrobial clinical efficacy in humans.

Elverbørn Sponsor: cloud b

Background for the DanCard

The frequency of antibiotic resistance is increasing dramatically all over the world and pan-resistant Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus, i.e. strains resistant towards all known antibiotics, are now being reported worldwide, including Denmark1-3,8,9. In most cases a direct relationship has been shown between increasing antibiotic use and development of resistance1-3,5,7-9. Some of these multi-resistant bacteria (e.g. methicillin-resistant S. aureus, MRSA) have recently emerged in animals, raising important questions about antibiotic usage in veterinary medicine4,6. Starting from the mid 1980s, many of the big pharmaceutical companies down-scaled or stopped their anti-infectious research, since the market for antibiotics was not considered profitable enough due to the long and expensive procedure required for approval of new antibiotics. The last new group of antibiotic compounds with high efficiency against gram-negative bacteria was the fluoroquinolones, which were marketed in 1980s. No truly new antibiotic drug class is presently in progress to be registered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the European Medicines Agency (EMEA)7. With at least a 10-year span from patenting the molecule to marketing the compound as a drug, it appears that we are being surpassed by antibiotic resistance. The consequences are grave: we may soon not be able to treat infections such as meningitis, endocarditis or pneumonia1,5.