Research consortia to develop new treatments against fungal and bacterial infections
Lindon Moodie and Luke Robertson will try to identify new substances with anti-fungal effects. Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt.
Two international consortia, led by Uppsala University researchers, have been granted funding from the European partnership Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance. In one of the projects, the researchers aim to discover new substances to treat fungal infections. The other project focuses on developing strategies to introduce new antibiotics in healthcare.
Last year, the EU partnership Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR) offered research grants that aim to counteract the emergence and spread of bacterial and fungal resistance and improve treatments. Thirteen projects were granted funding for a total of 17.2 million euros and two of them are led by Uppsala University researchers. They are now about to start.
New anti-fungal substances
In the project, A Fungal Hit Discovery Platform, Lindon Moodie at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Luke Roberson at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences, together with international partners, will use two different approaches to find new anti-fungal substances. In one of them, they will screen ultra-large libraries to identify substances that target fungal proteins. In the other, they will use libraries of small molecules and investigate whether they can induce bacteria to produce novel anti-fungal compounds. Promising hit compounds will then be studied further to investigate their anti-fungal potencies and how they can be optimised towards the clinic.
“This project will present an interesting learning curve, since most of us have little experience in the anti-fungal area. But it will also be exciting, as we are all bringing in different skills to help tackle this problem in novel ways,” says Lindon Moodie.
Lindon Moodie finds the project exciting as everyone is bringing different competences to tackle the problem in novel ways. Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt.
How to introduce new antibiotics
The other granted project has the acronym INTRODUCE and is led by Thomas Tängdén, Department of Medical Sciences. Here the researchers will tackle the lack of new antibiotics reaching the market and resistance development to the new drugs. They will map existing strategies to make the new drugs available in different countries and analyse current programmes for surveillance of usage and emerging resistance to the new antibiotics. The aim is to develop strategies for introducing new antibiotics to preserve patient safety and counteract the emergence of resistance.
Thomas Tängdén is leading a project to tackle the problem of the lack of new antibiotics and the development of resistance. Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt.
European partnership funding
Besides JPIAMR, there are several additional European partnerships in the health area, focusing, for instance, on Personalised Medicine, Rare Diseases, Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health. The partnership programmes offer funding for international consortia in their respective topics and complement regular calls within EU’s Cluster 1: Health.
Partnership projects are most commonly evaluated and granted at the European level but the different partners are funded by their respective national research funding agencies. In Sweden, this is generally the Swedish Research Council or Vinnova.
Kerstin Henriksson