For the third year in a row, Johnson & Johnson is proud to be named one of the top three companies leading the way in addressing the present and rising health challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This year’s AMR Benchmark—developed by the independent Access to Medicine Foundation—recognized the company’s strong performance across three critical areas: increasing access to medicines for patients in need, ensuring careful stewardship and responsibly manufacturing our medicines.
“Left unchecked, AMR could render antibiotics—one of the backbones of modern medicine—powerless against the diseases they currently protect people from,” said Martin Fitchet, M.D., Global Head, Global Public Health at Johnson & Johnson and Member of the Board of the AMR Action Fund. “Greater innovation is urgently needed to outpace AMR by safeguarding the treatments we have today and accelerating the development of the treatments of tomorrow.”
The World Health Organization considers AMR one of the top ten global health threats, with the potential to cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050—around the same number of people who died of cancer in 2020—and turn everyday infections and simple surgical procedures into potentially life-or-death ordeals.
“At Johnson & Johnson, we are committed to doing our part to address this global health threat—from research in our labs to responsible stewardship at the last mile,” Dr. Fitchet added.
About Johnson & Johnson’s efforts to combat AMR
For more than two decades, Johnson & Johnson has been leading in the fight against drug-resistant tuberculosis, which is responsible for one-third of all deaths from AMR. Beyond this, we’re also investing heavily in research and development in our labs and in collaboration with other leaders across industry and academia to tackle a range of drug-resistant infections.
Johnson & Johnson has a longstanding legacy of advancing innovative new treatments and tools and working with communities to outpace the growing threat of AMR. In our own labs and in collaboration with our partners, the company is helping lead efforts to develop the next generation of DR-TB treatments as a member of both the PAN-TB collaboration and the UNITE4TB partnership. Additionally, in July 2021, we launched the first Johnson & Johnson Satellite Center for Global Health Discovery at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine with the aim of accelerating the early-stage science needed to address the entrenched threat of DR-TB.
At the last mile, we are taking innovative steps to increase access to our medicine for multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), which is available to more than 135 low- and middle-income countries through the Stop TB Partnership’s Global Drug Facility. We are also working tirelessly and collaborativelyto identify the “missing millions” of undiagnosed people living with TB and bring them into treatment, while also safeguarding the long-term effectiveness of our medicine.
In addition to our efforts to end DR-TB, Johnson & Johnson is a proud founding member of the AMR Industry Alliance and the AMR Action Fund, which at $1 billion is the largest collective venture ever created to address the AMR threat and aims to bring two-to-four new antibiotics to patients by 2030.
For more information on our efforts to address DR-TB and AMR, please visit jnj.com/tb and jnj.com/AMR.