Pharmaceutical giant Novartis

will publish research on the development of drugs to treat some of the deadliest antimicrobial-resistant pathogens as part of an initiative aimed at promoting further scientific efforts within the field. The Pew Charitable Trusts last year launched the Shared Platform for Antibiotic Research and Knowledge; SPARK is an open-access research program that will make information from past published studies and unpublished data available to all researchers at no cost. The goal is to spark development of antibiotics to combat the growing prevalence of the Gram-negative class of pathogens, a highly resistant type of bacteria.