Abstract Description

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major threat to global public health, accounting for > 1.3 million deaths in 2019 and without intervention, predicted to reach 10 million deaths by 2050. There is a critical need for novel classes of antibiotics to combat drug resistant bacterial and fungal pathogens. The SA/UK Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (ADD) Hub was launched in 2020 as a collaborative partnership to address the challenge of AMR, by establishing a multidisciplinary platform for cutting-edge antimicrobial discovery research, and to develop infrastructure and build capacity to support furture drug discovery efforts. The aim is to exploit the chemical diversity of natural products (NPs) as a source of new antimicrobial leads. The focus of this talk will be on the Hub's marine NPs discovery pipeline developed to dervie maximum benefit from limited sample biomass, where employing a multi-omics approach facilitates rapid dereplication of bioactive extracts, enabling the early prioritisation of active NPs for functional characterisation and progression to lead optimisation.