ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Pharmacol.
Sec. Ethnopharmacology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fphar.2025.1633382
This article is part of the Research TopicUnveiling the Future of Antibiotics: Exploring the WHO Priority List of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria for Discovery, Research, and Development of Novel TherapeuticsView all 7 articles
The WHO's critical bacteria list: scientific response eight years after its implementation and development of an AI-based tool for its monitoring
Provisionally accepted
Juan Eduardo Robledo Almonacid1,2Christian Lombardo3Mariana Romano4Agustina Quiroga4Paula Cambuli Bianchi5Mauricio Hualpa6
Constanza Giai4Xiomara Maria Oviedo7Ramiro Alejo Salgado Mansur2
Mariana Guadalupe Vallejo8*
Cristian Andres Quintero4,9*- 1Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Facultad de Ciencias Médicas, Cordoba, Argentina
- 2Universidad Nacional de Cordoba Facultad de Ciencias Quimicas, Crdoba, Argentina
- 3Universidad de Buenos Aires Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 4Universidad Juan Agustin Maza, Mendoza, Argentina
- 5Universidad de Mendoza, Facultad de Ciencias Medicas, Mendoza, Argentina
- 6Obra Social de Empleados Públicos-OSEP, Mendoza, Argentina
- 7Universidad Nacional de La Rioja, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales., La Rioja, Argentina
- 8Facultad de Ciencias Químicas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina
- 9Universidad de Mendoza, Mendoza, Argentina
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Background: In 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a global alert identifying 12 bacteria in urgent need of new treatments. Main body: This study assesses the scientific community's response to this alert by analyzing original research publications using LLMzCor, an AI-based tool developed and validated by our group. To compare trends, we focused on publications from five years before and after the alert, specifically on three bacteria listed in the WHO alert, sorted by priority level: A. baumannii (Critical), Shigella spp. (High), and N. gonorrhoeae (Medium) and three non-listed as controls (Rickettsia spp., C. trachomatis, and C. difficile). Articles were classified into three categories: (i) identification of Resistant strains, (ii) development of New treatments, and (iii) Immunization strategies. Results: Although overall publications increased after the WHO alert, no statistically significant changes were found in the reports of Resistant strains over time. The development of New treatments for the listed bacteria showed a slight increase, between 2% and 10%. Furthermore, Immunization strategies remained relatively unchanged, with less than 2%. Meanwhile, LLMzCor demonstrated robust performance across categories, F1-scores ranging from 0.65 to 0.72 in key classifications, while recall peaked at 0.75, indicating a high capacity to identify relevant articles. These results support the model's reliability for large-scale automated classification of scientific abstracts. Conclusion: These findings, supported by LLMzCor, underscore the urgency of a stronger WHO alert and action plans to develop new strategies against bacterial resistance.
Keywords: antibiotic, antibiotic resistance, automatic classifier, Treatment, WHO
Received: 22 May 2025; Accepted: 18 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Robledo Almonacid, Lombardo, Romano, Quiroga, Cambuli Bianchi, Hualpa, Giai, Oviedo, Salgado Mansur, Vallejo and Quintero. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Mariana Guadalupe Vallejo, Facultad de Ciencias Químicas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina
Cristian Andres Quintero, Universidad Juan Agustin Maza, Mendoza, Argentina
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.