LifeArc has joined the Fleming Initiative as a founding partner alongside Cepheid and Optum, contributing to the initiative reaching a £100 million milestone. We’ll bring our expertise in early translation to help tackle the global health threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).  

The Initiative is a new approach focused on addressing unmet and emerging needs that individual organisations or isolated fields of scientific research would be unable to tackle alone.  

The combined funding will be used to kickstart global programmes to address the drivers of AMR, develop international networks of AMR expertise, and outline strategic research themes to rapidly advance solutions to these urgent challenges. 

We are contributing £25 million, and will harness our expertise in drug discovery, intellectual property management and technology transfer in this fight to address AMR, which is predicted to kill over 39 million people between 2025 and 2050.   

The Initiative will go beyond scientific endeavour to explore how innovation in policy, behavioural science and public engagement can turn the tide against AMR.   

Dr Dave Powell, Chief Scientific Officer at LifeArc says “We need to take bold action against AMR, and LifeArc is proud to become a founding partner of the Fleming Initiative. We will use our expertise in early translation to support developments in drug discovery, intellectual property management and technology transfer, so that we can accelerate solutions to AMR and potentially save millions of lives.”

This represents another significant investment by LifeArc to tackle AMR. As part of our Global Health Translational Challenge, we’ve also co-founded the £30m Pathways to Antimicrobial Clinical Efficacy (PACE) initiative alongside Innovate UK and Medicines Discovery Catapult, which aims to accelerate the pace of innovation in AMR and drive new breakthroughs towards the people that need them. 

About the Fleming Initiative

Established by Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, the Fleming Initiative is a collaborative new approach focused on addressing unmet and emerging needs that individual organisations or isolated fields of scientific research would be unable to tackle alone. Initially its work will focus on areas of increasing importance to tackle the urgent rise in AMR, including:  

• Closing the diagnostic gap for half of the world’s population who do not have the right tools to fight infections 

• Slowing the rising tide of fungal antimicrobial resistance (fAMR)  

• Understand the intersection between AMR, climate change and environmental data to better map and predict the transmission of resistant infections, so that we can control the spread of AMR worldwide. 

Earlier this year global biopharma company GSK became the first founding partner of the Initiative, with a pledge of £45 million.   

The international work of the Initiative will be carried out by establishing a global network of centres in strategic locations around the world that will find, test, and scale solutions to AMR. Taking an enabling and scaling role, the first Fleming Centre will be based at St Mary’s Hospital in London – at the site of the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928 – and will form a key part of the Imperial’s WestTech Corridor and Paddington Life Sciences. The appeal to launch the Fleming Initiative was announced in 2023, with His Royal Highness Prince William, The Prince of Wales, as its Patron.