From the 11th to the 15th of April 2025, Messe Wien Exhibition and Conference Centre in Vienna hosted leading experts, industry professionals, and clinicians to share intelligence on the status of infectious disease management, clinical microbiology, diagnostics, and drug development. During the “Therapeutic Pipeline Corner: celebrating 10 years of Innovation, Lessons Learned and Outlook” session on Monday, MetalloBio’s Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor Professor spoke about the distinctive inorganic chemistry at the heart of MetalloBio's innovative drug development and antimicrobial coatings programmes. He provided insights into the truly novel science, reporting evidence for new modes of action and data showing no emergence of genetic resistance; both being key aspects of a desirable antibiotic treatment profile. ESCMID Programme Director, Jacob Moran-Gilad, believes this to have been the ‘biggest [ESCMID conference], with respect to the number of sessions, faculty members and abstracts presented,’ and that the quality of the research and innovation was, ‘very, very high.’ Themes echoed throughout the conference included: the continued need for effective broad-spectrum and targeted narrow-spectrum antimicrobial treatments; the requirement for rapid and informative diagnostics; ongoing struggles to treat patients even when AMR is not an issue; the low number of new treatments coming through - counterbalanced with optimism that more and more non-traditional treatments are in, and are going into, development. Funding remains challenging for SMEs (the main source of innovation in this field); but this is not something new. However, major pharma players are clearly looking at increasingly early-stage collaborations; a sign that they are actively seeking new products, and recognise that there is a dearth of compelling late-stage assets in this arena.