Approximately 1.7 million patients in the United States get an infection in the hospital each year, about 99,000 of whom will die as a result. Seventy percent of the bacteria causing such infections are resistant to at least one drug commonly used to treat these infections.
Strains of S. aureus resistant to methicillin are endemic in hospitals and increasing in non-hospital settings such as locker rooms, day care centers and the general community. S. aureus strains that evade the immune response in healthy people with no known risk factors for infection are known as community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA). Recently, several cases overseas and in the United States were reported of S. aureus developing resistance to vancomycin, a very powerful antibiotic prescribed for the most intractable bacterial infections.
In accordance with The Research Agenda of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for Antimicrobial Resistance (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/533451), NIH funds basic, translational, and clinical research to understand basic mechanisms of resistance, identify and characterize novel targets for new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics, and support the development of such products through preclinical and early-stage clinical trials. For example
NIH recently supported two independent partnerships to fund research—some specific for small businesses—that advance development of diagnostics that rapidly detect specific bacterial species and therapeutics to prevent antimicrobial resistance.