Research Axis 3

Resistance to antimicrobial treatments, such as antibiotics, is a major public health issue for which the World Health Organisation (WHO) proposes "to encourage innovation and research & development of new tools" to stop the global spread of this resistance.

Our understanding of the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance is limited by the difficulty of integrating the multiple dimensions of this global health problem, that lies at the interface between humans, animals (domestic and wild) and the environment.

It is essential to understand how antibiotic resistance mechanisms spread within communities at different scales, through both stochastic and deterministic processes. These communities are carried by macro-organisms, themselves organized into communities (for example, the human society). In this context, applying concepts and methodologies of community ecology to antimicrobial resistance problems could help to better take into account the complexity of antimicrobial resistance.

Two projects are funded by Ecofect in this Research Axis 3.