JPIAMR funding for the FunHitDisco project

In the AMR Interventions 2024 call of the JPI AMR platform, our international project "FunHitDisco: A Fungal Hit Discovery Platform" obtained funding of €1,329,273 for 36 months. The project consortium includes Lindon Moodie (project coordinator) and Luke Robertson (both from Uppsala University, SE), Seino Jongkees (VU Amsterdam, NL), Francesca Bugli (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, IT), together with Maria Klimecka and Maria Górna from our group.

Dr Maria Klimecka will serve as the PI of the Polish part of the project worth €387,255, which will be funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (EN|PL) under the grant agreement #2024/06/Y/NZ1/00176 "Platforma do wysokoprzepustowego poszukiwania związków przeciwgrzybiczych."

News: JPIAMR EN| NCN PL EN| UW WCh PL I UU DMC EN

Project summary: EN| PL

Treatment-resistant fungal infections contribute to millions of deaths on a global scale and significantly impair the standard of living of many. Despite a century of efforts from modern medicine, clinicians have only a limited array of antifungal drug classes for deployment. To further complicate this, fungal pathogens are developing resistance to these drugs. We need new classes of drugs and those that act against different targets to our current drugs. The alternative, slightly modifying known drugs, will only buy time until resistance mechanisms catch up.
To help alleviate this problem we will establish FunHitDisco: A Fungal Hit Discovery Platform. In this project, we will use new methods that offer access to chemicals very different from what is currently in use. One of these approaches will use collections of the chemicals produced by bacteria in their fight against fungi, their rivals in the biosphere. Production of these ‘chemical weapons’ will be triggered by adding stimulating signals called elicitors to trick the bacteria into thinking they are in competition. The other approach uses a highly modular class of molecule called peptides, and works by generating extremely large collections of these. These are barcoded with RNA, and this lets us identify which are active against a fungal protein target. This essentially uses evolution on the molecule level to find new drugs.
The molecules identified will then be chemically optimised to improve their potency and drug-like properties, and their mode of action will be investigated; beginning their journey towards the clinic.

! PhD student wanted to work in the project ! - see the job offer PDF

This project FunHitDisco has been supported by the National Science Centre, Poland under the framework of the JPIAMR – Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance.

ERA-NET JPIAMR ACTION Call 2024 - Interventions moving forward to promote action to counteract the emergence and spread of bacterial and fungal resistance and to improve treatments