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BactiVac teams up with MHRA and GAMRIF for AMR innovation conference

MHRA secures funding to support AMR innovators, streamlining development and regulation, with a focus on LMICs and collaboration through key stakeholder events.

12 May 2025•2 min read
Group of attendees at the GAMRIF Event

In April 2024, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) secured three years of funding from the Global AMR Innovation Fund (GAMRIF) to provide support for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) innovators involved in GAMRIF-funded projects.

The MHRA-GAMRIF Programme aims to support AMR-focused research and innovation across the One Health spectrum with a strong emphasis on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The programme provides critical regulatory science support to innovators, including mapping the AMR innovation landscape, offering help understanding regulatory requirements, and identifying where there is a need for reference materials to aid in medicinal product characterisation and assay validation. The key aim is to streamline the product development process by addressing key challenges around quality, safety, and efficiency as early as possible.

One major milestone of the project has been the AMR Innovation: Ideation to Regulation and Beyond conference held in London on 26 - 27 March 2025. This conference brought together 120 delegates from a wide range of stakeholder groups, including expert speakers, researchers, GAMRIF delivery partners, product developers, manufacturers, funders, policymakers, and regulators to provide practical help in identifying barriers to AMR research and innovation.

Nineteen BactiVac Catalyst Funding Awardees were invited to participate and contribute to key discussions. Members of the BactiVac Network Operations Management Group, Adam Cunningham, Johanna Dean, and Jamie Pillaye also attended, seeking ways to better support MHRA-GAMRIF efforts and understand the regulatory challenges faced by BactiVac members as they progress their vaccine candidates.

Over two days, the conference covered the entire innovation journey, from ideation and preclinical development through to regulatory pathways, manufacturing, and access strategies with a particular focus on LMIC contexts. Each session included interactive workshops designed to spark discussion and collect actionable insights from participants. These contributions are being compiled into a report to be shared with attendees and the broader AMR community, helping to inform the programme’s ongoing work.

The MHRA-GAMRIF team said that ‘feedback from attendees strongly indicates that delegates found the meeting useful and informative, which was one of our main objectives. We are using information from the workshop discussions and the feedback to help shape the programme going forward and ensure we are providing the right support for product developers. The MHRA-GAMRIF team wishes to thank and acknowledge Jamie and Jo at BactiVac for all their help in getting the meeting planned and executed within a tight timeframe. Their experience in delivering impactful international meetings really helped us to make the meeting a success.’

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the MHRA, the MHRA-GAMRIF team, and in particular programme lead Carmen Coxon, as well as Leanne Cleaver and Matthew Lamaudiere for inviting us to be involved in such an important and impactful event, and for their ongoing support of BactiVac. We truly value this partnership and look forward to continued collaboration with this innovative programme in the future.

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  • Professor Adam Cunningham

    Professor of Functional Immunity

    School of Infection, Inflammation and Immunology

    Staff profile for Professor Adam Cunningham who is Professor of Functional Immunity within the Department of Immunology and Immunotherapy at the University of Birmingham.

    Phone: +44 (0)121 414 4068
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