Do you have the next antibiotic?
One critical bottleneck to discovering new antibiotics is the limited chemical diversity (compounds that have different structures) screened for antimicrobial activity. Antibiotics occupy a different ‘chemical space’ from compounds commonly found in commercial libraries.
CO-ADD, The Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery, is a global open-access screening initiative launched in February 2015 to uncover significant and rich chemical diversity held outside of corporate screening collections. CO-ADD provides unencumbered free antimicrobial screening for any interested academic researcher. CO-ADD has been recognised as a novel approach in the fight against superbugs by the Wellcome Trust, who have provided funding through their Strategic Awards initiative.
We are reaching out to chemists in academia and research organisations who have compounds ‘sitting on shelves’ that were not designed as antibiotics and would not otherwise be screened for antimicrobial activity. These compound libraries are screened at no cost against a key panel of drug-resistant bacterial strains. So far we have screened over 300,000 compounds from 43 countries.
Researchers who get positive results from initial screening have the option to proceed with us to lead development using our integrated chemistry, biology and pharmacology capabilities.
This ‘one-stop shop’ can help fast track a novel hit compound from this early stage research program through to identification of an investigational new drug (IND) candidate. We are excited to share this unique opportunity with the worldwide community of researchers to combat the ‘superbug crisis’.
CO-ADD is a global initiative of The University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience and initially funded by the Wellcome Trust and The University of Queensland.
"Helping Chemists Discover New Antibiotics"
Mark A. T. Blaskovich , Johannes Zuegg , Alysha G. Elliott , and Matthew A. Cooper. ACS Infect. Dis., May 13, 2015. DOI: 10.1021/acsinfecdis.5b00044
Is the next antibiotic on your laboratory shelf waiting to be discovered?
There are currently 57 million compounds deposited in the CAS registry and 21 million of these are (in theory at least) commercially available, which means that there is untapped diversity in the scale of >36 million compounds contained in the laboratories of academic and small biotech companies, with thousands of chemists discovering and synthesising more every day. This degree of chemical diversity is not present in pharmaceutical libraries, many of which have already been screened for new antibiotics. The vast majority of these non-commercial compounds have been prepared for other projects and will unfortunately remain on laboratory shelves never to be assessed for antimicrobial potential. With the sheer number of compounds out there, almost every chemist can contribute to antibiotic discovery. CO-ADD is here to provide you with readily accessible and free antimicrobial testing.
Proud winner of the 2016 UK Antibiotic Guardian Award for Research