Pfizer has made an online move into the fight against antimicrobial resistance with the launch of a new online and mobile information resource.

Its Antimicrobial Testing Leadership and Surveillance, or ATLAS, site will provide the health community with country-specific data on the efficacy from, and resistance to, antibiotic treatments.

It’s available online as a stand-alone website and also as a mobile app – albeit so far only in an iPhone version – and covers more than 60 countries.

Dr Freda Lewis-Hall, Pfizer’s chief medical officer, said: “An important aspect for physicians when treating patients is knowledge; knowledge of where certain resistant bacterial infections tend to occur and knowledge of which antibiotics remain effective against them.

“ATLAS underscores our continued commitment to providing patients and physicians with meaningful resources that can help ensure appropriate utilisation of antibiotics and improve infection prevention and control.”

The pharma firm hopes ATLAS will help doctors select appropriate antibiotics for their patients and inform global health strategies against the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance.

Around the world some 700,000 deaths per year are attributed to antimicrobial resistance, a figure that’s predicted to rise to 10 million by 2050 if action is not taken.

To that end Pfizer and more than 100 other firms and 13 trade associations last year signed up to the Declaration on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance, calling for greater industry and government collaboration to address AMR.

This was followed later in 2016 by the Industry Roadmap to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance. It was supported by Pfizer and 13 other pharma companies, who committed to reducing the environmental impact of antibiotic production, helping ensure appropriate use, improving access to current and future antibiotics and pursuing public-private collaborations.

Through its new website Pfizer will provide doctors and data around parameters such as pathogen, region, specimen source and in vitro susceptibility data. The ATLAS database will be updated every six months with new resistance data from healthcare institutions in more than 60 countries.

Meanwhile, Pfizer’s new antibiotic for multidrug resistant (MDR) infections, Zavicefta, was launched in its first European markets earlier this year after the pharma firm paid its developer AstraZeneca $1.58bn for it.

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