Pfizer, MSD, Shionogi fund new film sounding the alarm about antibiotic resistance

A new film about a global disease threat lays out dire scenarios that echo Hollywood disaster movie plotlines. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), however, is very real — and the film debuting on Tuesday tracks the global scientific race to stop it.

“Race Against Resistance: The Life and Death Struggle to Save Antibiotics,” funded by Pfizer, Shionogi, MSD and the AMR Action Fund, tracks the struggle to solve “one of the most significant existential threats to humanity,” as one researcher says in the film’s trailer.

Chris Sweeney

The roughly 40-minute documentary-style video was created by BBC Storyworks Commercial Productions after it produced a video series for industry trade group BIO that included dozens of pharma backers. While AMR had been suggested as a possible topic for those shorter videos, the group realized the complex topic needed more than two minutes to explain and explore, said Chris Sweeney, the director of communications for the AMR Action Fund.

While the AMR Action Fund and pharma funders were “very hands off,” he said, the BBC custom studio “ran with it, and just nailed it.”

“For years, people have been referring to AMR as the silent pandemic because it’s so overlooked, and that has some merit to it, but it’s also a disservice to the patients and clinicians working on this,” Sweeney said. “It’s a grand pandemic. It directly kills 1.27 million people a year and indirectly contributes to five million deaths a year. There’s nothing silent about it.”

One of the goals of the film is to help people understand AMR is not a future problem but an immediate one. The film features people who have survived AMR – a young woman gymnast and a clinician among them — along with leading AMR voices, scientists, academics, and biotech CEOs from Adaptive Phage Therapeutics and Phare Bio, which are both researching therapies.

“What world are we going to give our children if we’ve lost all the antibiotics, and they go back to dying of a scratch they got in the garden when playing?” says Dame Sallie Davies, UK Special Envoy on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and former chief medical officer for England, in the trailer opening.

Pfizer is promoting the film, which will be available on YouTube on Tuesday, on Instagram and on Facebook with the trailer and hashtag #StopSuperbugs.

The AMR Action Fund plans to show some of the film at a panel and conversation set up for later this month at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Sweeney said, with the goal to not only raise more global awareness of AMR but also spur policymakers to prioritize the problem. The fund is a $1 billion public-private partnership that invests in new antimicrobial therapies with the goal of 2-4 by 2030, raises AMR awareness and lobbies for government health policies.

“We need policymakers to take steps to fix the market and to change how antibiotics are valued. And we need that to happen across the G7 with real action soon,” he said. “The film is a call to action in the sense that it makes very clear the threat and what we’re facing.”

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