MOSCOW (MRC) -- Ineos, one of the world’s largest manufacturing companies, and the University of Oxford are launching a new world-leading institute to combat the growing global issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which currently causes an estimated 1.5 million excess deaths each year- and could cause over 10m deaths per year by 2050, said Chemweek.
Predicted to also create a global economic toll of USD100 trillion by mid-century, it is arguably the greatest economic and healthcare challenge facing the world post-Covid.It is bacterial resistance, caused by overuse and misuse of antibiotics, which arguably poses the broadest threat to global populations. The world is fast running out of effective antibiotics as bacteria evolve to develop resistance to our taken-for-granted treatments. Without urgent collaborative action to prevent common microbes becoming multi-drug resistant (commonly known as ‘superbugs’), we could return to a world where taken-for-granted treatments such as chemotherapy and hip replacements could become too risky, childbirth becomes extremely dangerous, and even a basic scratch could kill.
The rapid progression of antibacterial resistance is a natural process, exacerbated by significant overuse and misuse of antibiotics not only in human populations but especially in agriculture. Meanwhile, the field of new drug discovery has attracted insufficient scientific interest and funding in recent decades meaning no new antibiotics have been successfully developed since the 1980s.
The new Ineos Oxford Institute will benefit from the internationally outstanding facilities and expertise of Oxford University, which played the key role in the origin of antibiotics following Fleming and Oxford’s discovery and development of penicillin in the last century. The IOI will create collaborative and cross-disciplinary links across the sciences, and will be based between two sites in Oxford, linking the University’s Department of Chemistry with the new Life & Mind Building, which is currently under construction.
Prolonging the benefits of antibiotics the world has known since the 1940s requires both urgent new drug development, and better management of the existing drugs we have. It is natural that the microbes causing illness and infection gradually evolve to evade our treatments, but misuse of antibiotics - for instance overusing them and not finishing a full prescribed course - drastically accelerates this process.
The majority of global antibiotic consumption by volume is used for agriculture, and drug use in animals is contributing significantly to their lessening effectiveness in humans. The INEOS Oxford Institute for AMR Research (IOI) will therefore focus on designing novel antimicrobials just for animals, as well as exploring new human drugs.
As MRC informed earlier, Ineos agreed on a long-term power purchase agreement for renewable offshore wind power in Belgium with RWE (Essen, Germany). Under the terms of the 10-year deal, which begins in 2021, Ineos will purchase 56 megawatts (198 gigawatt hours/year) of offshore wind power from RWE Supply &Trading, an RWE subsidiary, produced at the Northwester2 wind park in the North Sea off Belgium.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's DataScope report, PE imports to Russia decreased in January-November 2020 by 17% year on year and reached 569,900 tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted for the greatest reduction in imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia increased by 21% year on year to about 202,000 tonnes in the first eleven months of 2020. Propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase in imports.
Ineos Group Limited is a privately owned multinational chemicals company consisting of 15 standalone business units, headquartered in Rolle, Switzerland and with its registered office in Lyndhurst, United Kingdom. It is the fourth largest chemicals company in the world measured by revenues (after BASF, Dow Chemical and LyondellBasell) and the largest privately owned company in the United Kingdom.
MRC