11 December 2024
Amazon Web Services collaborate with the Trinity Challenge to enhance winning teams’ solutions to antibiotic resistance
Amazon Web Services (AWS) have generously provided the winners of the Trinity Challenge on Antimicrobial Resistance with $750,000 of AWS Social Impact Credits as part of their Health Equity Initiative, a $60 million, three-year commitment, supporting organisations that are developing solutions to advance health equity.
The Trinity Challenge on Antimicrobial Resistance has awarded prize funding to solution teams from Vietnam, India and South Africa. The projects receiving funds are all focused on addressing significant data gaps in communities and lower-income countries that are disproportionately affected by antibiotic-resistant infections. All these projects will provide new technologies and/or gather new data to help farmers and healthcare workers mitigate the impact of AMR in community settings.
Three Trinity Challenge winners (Farm2Vet, OASIS and AMRSense) are progressing with their solutions having mapped their specific needs. AWS credits will allow them to replace current cloud-hosting costs, and access a transformative suite of services to help realise and scale their solutions securely.
Professor Marc Mendelson, Director, the Trinity Challenge, said: “We are extremely pleased to have been able to work with AWS in providing strategic support to ensure our amazing winners have solutions which are cloud ready. Given our winners have each responded to a call for innovative and data-led solutions to antibiotic resistance, data services and digital logistics are key to their success. It has been wonderful to be able to collaborate with AWS in the implementation stage so that our winners – many of whom are building new digital platforms for their solutions – can flourish.”
Kat Esser, Health Equity Lead, AWS Social Responsibility Impact, said: “Our health is largely determined by where we are born, how we grow up, our work, and where we live. For the majority of people, these factors are outside their individual control, and across the globe there exists a stark disparity in health outcomes. Funding from the AWS Health Equity Initiative and AWS’s broader social impact commitments aim to leverage the power of the cloud to make a difference to the health and lives of underserved populations globally.”
Through the initiative, AWS offers AWS credits and customised technical expertise to selected organisations around the world that want to use AWS services to improve health outcomes and health equity in any of the following areas:
1) Increasing access to high-quality, culturally responsive health services – Eligible projects can include synchronous healthcare (i.e., real-time telephone or audio-video interactions); increased access to high-quality diagnostic services; addressing bias in the diagnostic development process; and cleaning existing data sets to improve accuracy for race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or other data points that will help to advance health equity for all.
2) Increasing access to responsive social and community support – Eligible projects can include leveraging technology to improve access to social services, nutrition, transportation, housing, or economic opportunities to improve health outcomes. Additionally, projects can support research to deepen the understanding of and inform strategies to address disparities in social determinants of health.
3) Mitigating the impact of climate change on health and quality of life – Eligible projects must proactively address diverse environmental health threats in an adaptive and culturally responsive manner. Projects could leverage technology and data to control the spread of cross-species infectious diseases, utilise geospatial analysis for mapping outbreaks, and improve equitable air quality monitoring with enhanced community access and data analysis capabilities
About Antimicrobial Resistance
Antimicrobials are medicines used to treat bacteria (antibiotics), fungi (antifungals), viruses (antivirals) and parasites (antiparasitics).
Antimicrobial resistance happens when the microbes that cause infections evolve, stopping the medicines designed to kill them from working. This leads to treatments becoming ineffective and allowing infections to become increasingly difficult, or in some cases, impossible to treat. In the case of bacteria, this process is called antibiotic resistance, and this is the focus of the Trinity Challenge on Antimicrobial Resistance.
The speed at which antibiotic resistance is growing is a direct response to misuse and overuse of antibiotics across our healthcare systems and the food industry, and increasing levels of antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the environment . The situation with respect to antibiotic resistance in bacteria has developed to the point that it now threatens our health, food, environment and global security. Without action, by 2050, it is estimated that 39 million deaths will be directly caused by AMR.
About The Trinity Challenge
The Trinity Challenge (TTC) is a charity supporting the creation of data-driven solutions to help protect against global health threats.
The Trinity Challenge on Antimicrobial resistance received applications from 285 teams in 57 countries and distributed a prize fund of £2.7 million across four winning initiatives.
We believe data and analytics hold the key to building effective, affordable, and scalable solutions to current and future pandemics and health emergencies, and we are committed to working with governments, individuals and organisations across the world, to help improve our resilience against current and future threats to global health.
The winner of the Trinity Challenge on Antimicrobial Resistance grand prize of £1 million is Farm2Vet: Combatting AMR on the Farm Frontier. Farm2Vet, based in Vietnam, aims to create a new platform that will encourage responsible antibiotic use in food-producing animals by offering farmers instant, low-cost access to trusted veterinary services for disease diagnosis and treatment advice. As well as directly supporting farmers, the data gathered by the platform will inform policymakers by identifying hotspots of antibiotic resistance and allowing action to be taken to prevent outbreaks.
The winners of the joint second prize, each receiving £600,000, are AMRSense: Empowering Communities with a Proactive One Health Ecosystem and OASIS: OneHealth Antimicrobial Stewardship for Informal Health Systems. Both projects are based in India and aim to empower community health workers and informal caregivers with new technologies to gather data on AMR at the community level.
Find out about other funders of the Trinity Challenge here.
For more details or further comment contact Head of Communications and Engagement, Charlie Alderwick: [email protected] +447580 094013
For more information on the Trinity Challenge, please visit https://thetrinitychallenge.org/
