Meet the Ambassador…

Guest-blog by Amine Zorgani

Back in June 2019, I have connected to the AMR insights founder Maarten van Dongen as I found what he was doing through his information platform in regards to the antimicrobial resistance crisis very unique and I wanted to be part of it. When I look back in time and see what I have wrote to him I feel we have to double our efforts. This is how I felt and still feel today about the antimicrobial crisis “Dear Maarten, I would like to give some of my time and help in promoting your initiative and I will be delighted to do so… I am honestly scared that one day we will be telling ourselves “we should’ve acted fast, we should’ve informed more”. 

Information, if you are informed you will never take an antibiotic to treat a cold or a flu, right? If you are informed, you would never stop your course of antibiotic treatment half way as you would know that if you do so, you are likely to develop resistance to that same antibiotic, right? And if you are informed, you would know that if we don’t do something about what some calls “the post antibiotic era” the Humanity will face one of the biggest threats we ever seen.

In nowadays, information can spread very quickly and widely with all the existing social media platforms. However, these same platforms have the limitations of not been very focused and the message can be lost once someone clicks delete or unsubscribe! Having a network of professionals, people working on a daily basis to curb antimicrobial resistance seemed more than a needed.

Today I am extremely humbled to be part of the first network of professionals from 30+ countries where the shared goal is “let’s inform batter, let’s act on it, let’s make this world free from antimicrobial resistance”. I am proud to be part of the AMR insights Ambassadors network.

Dr. Amine Zorgani, Head of Microbiology and team leader at Nuritas in Ireland. He leads a team of experienced Microbiologists to uncover the potential bioactivities of plant-derived peptides. Ireland-based Nuritas uses artificial intelligence to predict bioactive peptides from plant genomes to target several (ESKAPE) human pathogens and food spoiling microbes.The mission of Nuritas is to find new antimicrobial therapies from a natural origin. Amine started his fight against AMR during his Ph.D. study. When he started working with Nuritas in 2017 he realised that his journey with AMR had just started…