Lindon Moodie and Luke Robertson receive 5 MSEK grant for new drug development platform
The Department of Medicinal Chemistry congratulates Lindon Moodie and Luke Robertson on receiving SEK 5 million from the Swedish Research Council for the development of an international platform with a focus on new treatments of antimicrobial resistant fungal infections.
The number of antimicrobial-resistant fungal diseases is increasing globally and the lack of effective treatments claims millions of human lives every year. The need for new tools to stop this downward spiral is urgent. The Swedish Research Council recently granted SEK 5 million to Lindon Moodie and Luke Robertson at Uppsala University to develop the international platform FunHitDisco: A Fungal Hit Discovery Platform.
“Modifying existing drugs will at best buy us time. So, we must search outside the traditional box to find new molecular starting points for antifungal drug discovery,” states Lindon Moodie, Associate Professor at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Coordinator of the work in FunHitDisco.
In collaboration with researchers from Poland, The Netherlands and Italy, the team will use high-throughput techniques to find novel bioactive peptides and natural products, and progress hit compounds through the development pipeline.
“Microbial-derived natural products have been a profound source of inspiration for drug discovery over the last century. However, in the lab, bacteria and fungi produce only a small fraction of the bioactive molecules that they have the genetic instructions to make. We aim to unlock this potential and explore this chemical dark matter,” adds Luke Robertson, Researcher at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences.
The platform consists of Lindon Moodie and Luke Robertson (Uppsala University, SE), Seino Jongkees (Vrije Universiteit, NL), Maria Klimecka (University of Warsaw, PL) and Francesca Bugli (Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli IRCCS, IT). FunHitDisco will receive additional funding 2025-2027 within the framework of the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR), a global organization coordinated at the Swedish Research Council that unites 29 countries in the work to stop antimicrobial resistance.
Facts
- FunHitDisco is an international platform for the development of new treatments against antimicrobial resistant fungal infections.
- The platform has received a total of grants corresponding to €1,329,273.
- By combining medicinal chemistry, microbiology and structural biology, the platform aim to identify relevant substances and target proteins to treat antimicrobial-resistant fungal diseases.
- The platform is coordinated at Uppsala University's Department of Medicinal Chemistry.
Contact
Lindon Moodie, Associate Professor
Department of Medicinal Chemistry
Lindon.Moodie@ilk.uu.se
Luke Robertson, Researcher
Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences
Luke.Robertson@uu.se
text: Magnus Alsne, photo: Mikael Wallerstedt a o