Tufts Medical Center professor named to presidential advisory council

Dr. Helen Boucher, director of the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program at the Tufts Medical Center, was named to President Barack Obama’s newly established Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria.

According to Boucher, who is also an associate professor at Tufts, the Advisory Council is comprised of 15 experts in relevant fields. A September 2014 executive order issued by Obama in an effort to increase the research and work put into fighting antibiotic-resistant bacteria required the committee's establishment.

Boucher believes she was selected for the Advisory Council because of her specific involvement in research on and the creation of new antibiotics.

“It’s a huge honor to get to work with this group, to be chosen out of a field of 300 extremely qualified individuals," Boucher said. "I’m very honored to get to serve my country this way.”

According to Boucher, the council’s role is to advise the government on how best to implement the five goals outlined in the White House’s National Strategy for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria. These goals include reducing the rate at which resistant bacteria appear and stopping infection transmission, increasing efforts to fight antibiotic resistance, furthering diagnostic tests to recognize resistant bacteria, creating new antibiotics and improving global efforts to combat antibiotic resistance.

“Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health threat across our country," Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Mathews Burwellsaid in a Sept. 15 press release. "That’s why it’s so important that we work together to address this challenge."

Boucher said that the group will examine antibiotic resistance in both people and animals.

"The five goals...include some measures to prevent the spread of resistance among animals, farm animals and our food,” Boucher said.

Boucher has spent her entire career in the field of antimicrobial resistance and has worked with the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) on two campaigns -- Bad Bugs, No Drugs and the 10 x ‘20 initiative -- in the last 10 years.

According to IDSA Director of Health Policy John Billington, the Bad Bugs, No Drugs initiative provides choices and ideas regarding policy on antibiotics, in addition to laying out an infectious disease physician’s perception of antibiotic resistance and its effects on human health.

Billington added that the 10 x ‘20 initiative was formed to champion proponents of 10 recently developed antibiotics by 2020.

“Both of these [campaigns] were started to raise awareness about the crisis of antibiotic resistance, the lack of antibiotics we have to treat our patients and the need for new research and development of antibiotics to treat resistant infections," Boucher said.

Billington expressed his support for Boucher.

“IDSA is very excited and pleased to see a handful of IDSA leaders, including Dr. Boucher...appointed to the Presidential Advisory Council,” Billington said. “We’re confident in the abilities of Dr. Boucher and others in making a real difference.”

According to another Advisory Council member, Dr. John Rex, senior vice president of the global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, the council will report to Burwell, who will then relay that information to Obama.

“I am delighted to see the amount of work already underway by the U.S. government in this area, and I look forward to engaging via the Presidential Advisory Council to further that work,” Rex told the Daily in an email.

Boucher joined the other members of the council in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 29 to begin discussing the goals and actions of the council, according to a Sept. 28 Boston Globe article.

Boucher said that after the council’s initial meeting, she feels that the Advisory Council will be able to achieve its goals and ensure that the United States does not regress to medical conditions prior to the invention of antibiotics.

“I’m very optimistic...that our patients will be able to continue to get the therapies that they deserve [and] that we’ll be able to preserve those by...[finding] ways to prevent the spread of resistance and to develop new medicines,” Boucher said.