The Fleming Initiative has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support the development of a global intelligence platform designed to improve surveillance, research and collaboration in the fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

The initiative, a partnership between Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, will receive cloud computing, artificial intelligence technology and technical support from AWS to help build a platform that brings together fragmented antimicrobial resistance datasets from around the world.

AMR is one of the world’s most significant public health challenges, with drug-resistant infections continuing to increase and making many existing treatments less effective. Researchers hope the new platform will enable scientists, clinicians and public health organisations to identify emerging resistance patterns more quickly and accelerate research into new interventions.

The cloud-based platform aims to integrate a range of global datasets, including antimicrobial surveillance information and compound libraries, allowing researchers to analyse data that has traditionally been held in separate systems across institutions and countries.

According to the Fleming Initiative, combining these datasets with AI tools could help identify previously unseen patterns of antimicrobial resistance and generate research insights more rapidly, supporting earlier detection of emerging threats and improved collaboration across international healthcare systems.

Professor Alison Holmes, director of the Fleming Initiative, said: “Antimicrobial resistance is a global challenge that no single institution, country, or dataset can solve alone. The support from AWS could help us unlock new opportunities to bring together expertise, data, and technology in ways that were not previously possible. By supporting more connected and accessible data ecosystems, researchers and public health leaders could collaborate more effectively, move faster, and generate new insights at the scale and pace that matches the urgency of the AMR crisis.”

The initiative plans to create what it describes as a global AMR intelligence platform capable of supporting researchers, healthcare organisations, industry and policymakers by improving access to integrated data and strengthening surveillance capabilities across borders.

Lord Darzi, executive chair of the Fleming Initiative, said: “Medicine and public health are increasingly driven by data. The opportunity now is not simply to gather more of it, but to turn it into action; at the speed and scale this threat demands. By pairing world-leading scientific expertise with the most advanced technology available, we can build a new generation of intelligence for AMR: one that allows countries, researchers, and health systems to anticipate threats rather than react to them. That is the ambition this moment requires.”

The World Health Organization has identified antimicrobial resistance as one of the leading global public health threats. By combining cloud infrastructure with large-scale health data, the Fleming Initiative hopes to strengthen international efforts to monitor resistance patterns and support the development of more effective responses to drug-resistant infections.

Digital illustration showing global antimicrobial resistance surveillance, laboratory scientists analysing infectious disease data, or a world map connected by healthcare data networks.