Tackling Antifungal Resistance: RAFT Project Secures Major Grant

News | Posted on Tuesday 14 January 2025

The RAFT project, a groundbreaking international collaboration, has been awarded a prestigious grant exceeding € 1 million to address the growing crisis of antifungal resistance—a global healthcare challenge exacerbated by climate change, antifungal overuse, and a lack of innovative treatments.

The program is funded by the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR), an international collaborative platform uniting 29 countries and the European Commission to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR)

Led by Dr Angelo Frei from the University of York, the RAFT (Revitalising the Antifungal Pipeline with Transition Metals) team is aiming to reinvigorate antifungal drug discovery through the systematic exploration of transition metal complexes. These compounds, which have shown promise as antimicrobial agents, offer a novel approach to combating drug-resistant fungal infections.

The RAFT project brings together a world-class, interdisciplinary team of researchers from four leading institutions:

  • Dr Angelo Frei (Lead), University of York, United Kingdom
  • Dr Michael Bromley, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
  • Professor Michaela Wenzel, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
  • Professor Amy Cain, Macquarie University, Australia

A New Approach to Fungal Infections

Antifungal resistance is a pressing issue that threatens millions of lives annually. Current treatments are increasingly ineffective, and the development of new drugs has stagnated. The RAFT project will tackle this challenge by focusing on transition metal complexes—a relatively unexplored class of compounds that have demonstrated higher hit rates against fungi compared to organic molecules, with no increase in toxicity.

“Metal compounds have shown significant promise and represent an exciting, largely unexplored area of research,” explains Dr Frei. “There is tremendous potential to uncover new treatments.”

A Cutting-Edge Solution

The RAFT project will leverage state-of-the-art techniques, including combinatorial synthesis, automation, and machine learning, to prepare and test approximately 4,000 novel metal complexes.  By uniting expertise in inorganic chemistry, machine learning, antifungal screening, and preclinical evaluation, the RAFT team is uniquely positioned to advance metalloantifungals from the lab to the clinic.

If successful, RAFT could pave the way for the first metal-based antifungal drug, offering hope for millions facing drug-resistant fungal infections.