RESISFORCE: partnering Norway, Brazil, India, Canada, and the USA to further excellence in education, research, and innovation in the study of biofilms and antibiotic research

Resistance of pathogenic microbes to antibiotics is a growing worldwide concern, with global deaths due to antibiotic resistance predicted to overtake global deaths due to cancer and become the #1 cause of death worldwide by 2050 (Brown et al., 2017). Our RESISFORCE project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, partners research labs from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, the University of Oslo, TATA Consultancy Services (based in Delhi, India), the University of Campinas (Piracicaba, Brazil), McGill University (Montreal, Canada), the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Forsyth Institute, and OHSU to engage diverse trainees, clinicians, and scientists in educational outreach regarding the accelerating antibiotic resistance crisis and antibiotic stewardship. The Baker Lab has been an active partner in this project since 2019, and has facilitated RESISFORCE outreach symposia at dental conferences in Brussels, Belgium (CED-IADR 2021) and Marseille, France (PER-IADR 2022), as well as intensive symposia and hands-on workshops for trainees at the University of Oslo (2023) and the University of Campinas (2019, 2022). Our team has also produced a massive online open course (MOOC), entitled “Exploring the Landscape of Antibiotic Resistance in Microbiomes”, available on FutureLearn. This free online course enables interested clinicians, researchers, students, as well as members of the public, to discover how antibiotic resistance has emerged as one of the most urgent public health threats, explore how the study of antibiotic resistance genes helps us understand antibiotic resistance, and get hands-on experience examining data using the ResistoXplorer online tool (http://www.resistoxplorer.no ; itself produced as a collaboration initiated through the RESISFORCE project (Dhariwal et al., 2021)). RESISFORCE has also sponsored several international researcher exchanges between labs participating on the project, provided networking opportunities, and fostered fruitful research collaborations between the participating labs (Junges et al., 2018, Junges et al., 2019, Junges et al., 2019, Ricomini Filho et al., 2019, Salvadori et al., 2019, Dhariwal et al., 2021, Bajalan et al., 2022, Dornelas-Figueira et al., 2023, Junges et al., 2023). Since dentists account for approximately 10% of all antibiotic prescriptions, and antibiotic resistance and stewardship are frequently neglected topics in dental school curriculum, the unique dentistry-focused international outreach of this program is expected to be particularly impactful (Ramanathan et al., 2023).

The Baker Lab will also be hosting our 4-day annual RESISFORCE symposium here at OHSU on September 9-15 of 2024. This symposium will include a day of formal presentations by faculty from the RESISFORCE project, OHSU faculty in related fields, and regional leaders in microbiology and antibiotic resistance research (Friday, September 13, 2024). The symposium will also feature 3 days of interactive workshops for dental/graduate student and postdoctoral-level trainees (September 10-12, 2024). The workshops will include group problem-based learning sessions and presentations, working with other trainees from Brazil, Norway, the USA, and Canada, as well as a hands-on bioinformatics workshop. The symposium will be a tremendous opportunity to learn about current research in antibiotic resistance and oral health, and to network and interact on an international level with oral health researchers. Interested readers are invited to stay tuned for more information during the coming months.

This project is funded in part by INTPART-322375, a grant from the Research Council of Norway.