Submitted by Yan Pan on Fri, 23/01/2026 - 11:02
Researchers at the University of Cambridge are part of a major international effort exploring novel approaches to antibiotic discovery to deal with the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). With a total of $60 million in new grant funding over the next three years from the Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Wellcome, the Gram-Negative Antibiotic Discovery Innovator (Gr-ADI) will function as a first-of-its-kind consortium where multiple funders and research teams openly share data and learnings and work collectively to accelerate the discovery of urgently needed antibiotics.
“Drug resistance is one of the greatest global health threats, particularly for those most vulnerable to infectious diseases,” said Alexander Pym, director of infectious disease at Wellcome. A dire global health crisis that makes medical interventions less effective, AMR is causing in millions of deaths each year and more than $1 trillion in economic losses globally. Due to the high cost of bringing new products to market, antibiotic science is not keeping up with growing resistance, especially for Gram-negative bacteria.
Led by Professor Andres Floto, the Cambridge team will experimentally define the factors that control compound retention and xenometabolism in Klebsiella pneumoniae and the genetic determinants for variation in these processes across the phylogenetic diversity of this pathogen. The project will create predictive AI models of compound retention and stability by experimentally characterizing the chemical space of compounds that can accumulate inside this pathogen and remain stable. They will then use these models to steer chemical elaboration during structure-guided antibiotic discovery against novel targets, and make them freely available to academic and industry researchers.
“The AMR crisis demands fresh thinking and a different way of working,” said Marianne Holm, vice president, infectious diseases at the Novo Nordisk Foundation. “The Gr‑ADI consortium aims to cut through barriers to progress, bringing together researchers aligned by a commitment to share knowledge openly and make new data, methods, and tools available to all. We hope their discoveries and data will benefit the whole field and bring us closer to urgently needed new antibiotics.”
