Investigating the feasibility and potential of combining industry AMR monitoring systems: a comparison with WHO GLASS

Efforts to estimate the global burden of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) have highlighted gaps in existing surveillance systems. Data gathered from hospital networks globally by pharmaceutical industries to monitor antibiotic efficacy in different bacteria represent an underused source of information to complete our knowledge of AMR burden.. We analysed available industry monitoring systems to assess to which extent combining them could help fill the gaps in our current understanding of AMR levels and trends.

We analysed six industry monitoring systems (ATLAS, GEARS, SIDERO-WT, KEYSTONE, DREAM, and SOAR) obtained from the Vivli platform and reviewed their respective isolates collection and analysis protocols. Using the R software, we designed a pipeline to harmonise and combine these into a single dataset. We assessed the reliability of resistance estimates from these sources by comparing the combined dataset to the publicly available subset of WHO GLASS for shared bacteria-antibiotic-country-year combinations.

Combined, the industry monitoring systems cover 18 years (4 years for GLASS), 85 countries (71), 412 bacterial species (8), and 75 antibiotics (25). Although all industry systems followed a similar centralised testing approach, the patient selection protocol and associated sampling period were unclear. Over all reported years and countries, E.coli, K. pneumoniae and S. aureus resistance rates were in >65% of cases within 0.1 of the corresponding estimate in GLASS. We did not identify systemic bias towards resistance in industry systems compared to GLASS.

High agreement values for available comparisons with GLASS suggest that data for other bacteria-antibiotic-country-year combinations only present in industry systems could complement GLASS; however, for this purpose patient and isolate selection criteria must first be clarified to understand the representativeness of industry systems. This additional source of information on resistance levels could help clinicians and stakeholders prioritize testing and select appropriate antibiotics in settings with limited surveillance data.