The Antimicrobial Resistance Research Landscape and Emerging Solutions

Basic research is the first step towards identifying solutions. This brief examines the AMR research landscape since 2000, finding that the amount of research is increasing and that the U.S. is a leading publisher, but also that novel solutions like phages and synthetic antimicrobial production are a small portion of that research.

Pathogens developing resistance to common therapeutics complicate and undermine effective responses to global health crises. While antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is often discussed as a future crisis, AMR is, in reality, already a major global health challenge. Effective policy interventions to moderate and solve AMR require an understanding of the AMR research landscape—to inform choices about funding, incentivize novel drug development, and identify gaps in existing research and policy that require further attention.

This report analyzes 211,831 AMR-related research publications from CSET’s Merged Corpus that were published between 2000 and 2021, to track trends in research output, identify the leading countries and institutions publishing AMR research, major funders of this research, and patterns of international research collaboration.