Lord Jim O’Neill on AMR as financial and systemic risks

An increasing number of investors recognise that Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) poses a systemic risk to portfolios and to broader society. Yet despite growing recognition of AMR, and scary headlines warning of between 700,000 to 10Million deaths a year by 2050, the feedback on discussions about the use of antimicrobials in the value creation chain still includes words like “surprising” and “eye-opening”. To remain effective, antibiotics should be used for a short period of time and made affordable to patients who need them. These characteristics draw little interest from Venture Capital and do not support investment in R&D. In fact, the situation is often described as a broken business model that would require a ‘delinking’ of the reward paid to drug developers from the revenues derived directly from their sales. The problem is global and the risks are interconnected. The solutions? – Please join a conversation with Lord Jim O’Neill, the Chair of the UK’s Independent Review into Antimicrobial Resistance (completed in 2016), who also co-authored “Superbugs: An Arms Race against Bacteria” – a comprehensive follow-up to the Review. Jim O’Neill is a Member of House of Lords in the UK and a senior advisor of the Council of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He is a renowned economist, an Honorary Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester, and former Head of global economics research with Goldman Sachs. In 2010, he was named chairman of Goldman Sachs’ Asset Management, where he managed over $800 billion in assets by leveraging his global perspective on world markets. Lord O’Neill is well known for coining the BRICs acronym, which stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China – the four rapidly developing countries that have come to symbolise the shift in global economic power away from the G7 economies. He was appointed Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, with the primary role of working on the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ project.