Hi, it's producer Adrian here. We're bringing you a special podcast today from our Spotlight team, and the new Statesman podcast team will be back tomorrow.

Welcome to the Spotlight podcast from the new States, I'm Alona Ferber.

In this episode we're taking a special look at the fight against drug-resistant infections.

In 2014, the then Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned a review into a worrying global phenomenon, the increase in drug-resistant infections.

Micros, tiny living things too small to be seen by the naked eye-like bacteria that can often make us sick, revolving a resistance to medicines used to treat infections.

If we fail to act, I can't remember the time, we're looking at an almost unthinkable scenario where antibiotics that are on good work, we are cast back into the dark ages of medicine.

The economist Jim O'Neill, who chaired the review, predicted that by 2050, 10 mid-lives and accumulative costs of $100 trillion in economic output, would be at risk of micro-organisms like bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasite that were becoming increasingly resistant to treatments.

But six years on antimicrobial resistance, where AMR, as it is also known, continues to endanger humanity.

In this special episode of the Spotlight podcast sponsored by Pfizer, we brought together an expert panel to explain why AMR is so complex.

How far we have come in tackling it since the 2016 O'Neill review, and one of our best hopes are for getting it under control.

Alongside Pfizer-UK managing director and country president Susan Reno, we will hear from the UK government's AMR envoys Sally Davies, and the microbiologist Laura Piddett, scientific director of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership based in Geneva.

This podcast has been funded by Pfizer-limited. Non-FISA panelists views are independent, but content has been reviewed by Pfizer-limited for API code compliance.

Anti-microbial resistance is an enormously complex problem. But what causes it, and what do we know about the ways in which microbes have evolved to resist medicine?

Here's microbiologist Professor Laura Piddett, scientific director of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, which is based in Geneva.

My PhD that I started in 1982 was to investigate the way in which penicillin worked against bacteria that can cause infections in abdomen. Infections right inside cause abscesses, particularly post operations.

And part of the method was to use a radio labelled penicillin, so that I'm doing this experiments in the lab, and by radio labing the penicillin, you could identify what it's stuck to by its target, therefore understand its action.

And I was following some basic laboratory principles from people who described the method in other bacteria. It'd never been done in what I was doing.

And I couldn't understand why I was seeing nothing on the X-ray films. So it's like doing a chest X-ray and seeing no chest.

And it took me a while to realize that's because the bacteria were producing something that was chewing up the penicillin.

And they had this intrinsic drug resistance mechanism called a beta-lactamase. There's lots of different types of beta-lactamases, but they are responsible for the majority of resistance we see to drugs like penicillin.

And many of the drugs we use today found in many bacteria. So that's when I first realized that this type of resistance was a problem.

It was affecting my lab experiments, and I had to work out how to overcome that to be able to see the proteins, the targets I was really looking for.

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