FunHitDisco: A Fungal Hit Discovery Platform

The increasing threat of treatment-resistant fungal disease is of significant concern.

With a limited number of drug classes available, it is imperative to focus drug discovery efforts on both new compound classes and under-explored fungal protein targets. Here, academic consortia can contribute by feeding the antifungal drug pipeline with promising hit compounds.

In the current project, which brings together researchers from Sweden, Netherlands, Italy and Poland, we will use two innovative high throughput screening technologies, elicitor screening and mRNA display, to discover antifungal hit compounds.

These methods cover both target- and phenotypic-based screening approaches, and explore natural products and cyclic peptides respectively. These techniques are exciting new strategies for hit discovery and have not yet been applied towards antifungals.

Validated hits will then be optimised in a medicinal chemistry workflow that incorporates feedback from biochemical assays and structural biology.

Our goal is to generate validated hits corresponding to novel antifungal classes or those that act against under-explored protein targets, and to push these compounds for further development towards the clinic.