Antimicrobial Regeneration Consortium:
Accelerating R&D
for Pandemic Preparedness
and Countering Evolving Pathogens

Our Mission

Real-time pandemic response

Raising awareness about antimicrobial resistance



ARC Laboratories is a 501(c)(3)
tax exempt non-profit organization.

We rely on your donations
to make a difference.

what is pandemic preparedness?

A pandemic is disease outbreak that spreads across a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) in a relatively short period of time.

Pandemics can occur anytime very quickly when a new pathogen emerges with widespread reach—such as in the case of SARS-CoV2, Zika, Ebola virus. Pandemic can be also be on going such as when pathogens become more resistant to conventional treatments—such as in the case antimicrobial resistant (AMR) bacteria.
By mid-November 2020, COVID-19 crisis has infected greater than 54 million and killed more than 1.3 million people globally (in less than one year).

The 2019 United Nations report estimated that AMR crisis kills 700,000 people/year globally, and if trends continue the annual toll would climb to 10 million deaths in the next 35 years, costing a whopping US$ 100 trillion in losses by 2050.

Such loss of family and life is devastating, and demands a robust approach to counter pandemics in real-time. Such level of pandemic preparedness is currently not in place.
The biggest challenge:
Conventional approaches of developing therapeutics (that take on an average 10-15 years, and $US 1.5-3 billion) will not work when a threat is new every time.

Furthermore, the threat (microbe) can evolve quickly that can render these efforts fruitless.
Pandemic preparedness: At Antimicrobial Regeneration Consortium (ARC) Labs, we are trying to address pandemic preparedness by developing and supporting innovative technologies that can respond to an outbreak in a very short period of time, as well as those that can compete with evolving pathogens. Once the initial scientific  breakthrough is made, importantly, the translation of technology (scale-up, pre-clinical data, regulatory approvals etc.) need to occur at an alarming speed, something that is hard to navigate in real-time. Therefore, at ARC we are developing a data-driven network of scientific expertise to provide for a frame-work for translation of technologies.

what is antimicrobial resistance?

Every time an organism reproduces, its DNA changes a little bit; this is called a mutation. Sometimes mutations are productive—they can make us run faster or process food more efficiently—and other times they can be life-threatening genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis.

For organisms that reproduce very rapidly, these changes can be profound. Bacteria and viruses can replicate in under an hour, making mutations commonplace. Of the many mutations in a population, there’s almost always at least one that makes the population better at surviving it's current conditions.
If you have a bacterial infection and you treat it with antibiotics, it’s very possible that one of the mutations in that population could allow the bacterium to survive the antibiotic treatment. Because bacteria replicate so quickly, the population can become completely immune to the antibiotic treatment in just a few days, making the bacteria resistant.

The same is true for viral and fungal infections. If you catch a resistant infection, medicine doesn’t have a backup plan. Therefore we need to provide countermeasures, therapeutics, and diagnostics in real time.

an ecosystem of medical tech development

Evolving organisms are moving targets, making them much harder to treat compared to diseases like diabetes. Bacteria evolve resistance exponentially, but the current therapeutic pipeline is largely linear. On average, it takes $1.5 - 3 billion and 10-15 years to develop and approve a new drug, nowhere near quickly enough to respond to pandemics and emerging pathogens.

Many pharmaceutical companies have moved away from drug discovery for infectious diseases because the tedious, time-consuming process has low return on investment due to evolution of drug-resistance.
The COVID-19 crisis highlights all of these challenges. Our current drug development pipelines are not prepared to respond to pandemics. It is not possible to catch up to microbial evolution without novel and inovative approaches.

ARC Labs develops a framework for sustainable innovation to create and nurture an ecosystem of rapidly-developing promising technologies for global health.

we're not another company

ARC Labs is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. We’re not focused on turning a personal profit; we’re here to disrupt an archaic drug discovery pipeline to make medicine more accessible for all.

We focus on the strengths of the existing pillars of drug research and discovery: academia and industry. There exists so much untapped expertise and potential at the academic level, especially in early stage drug discovery. The pharmaceutical industry, on the other hand, coordinates massive amounts of funding for clinical trials and scale-up of successful technologies.

ARC Labs bridges these two presently isolated spheres of  research to bring medicine and treatments to patients who need them.
Our specialized team takes care of the networking, establishing a consortium of scientists at all points along a traditional drug discovery pipeline. When your resources and funding bring your development to a standstill, we identify another lab to pick up where you left off, ensuring revolutionary technologies don’t get left in the dust.

Successful platforms spin out of ARC Labs’ incubation process to form start-ups. ARC Labs takes small fraction of the income for these start-ups to remain self-sustainable as a non-profit organization.

the 3E model


We create materials, webinars, and seminars to educate the young and old about the current and future health challenge.
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Connect with our ARC network to collaborate on projects, explore new fields, and expand your scope. Engage with the passionate people around you to solve this global crisis.
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The technologies born out of this framework empower the globe to better counter emergent infectious disease.
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