Antimicrobial Resistance: New Funding, Antibiotic Design, and Faster Resistance Detection

Researchers and governments announced new funding and scientific advances aimed at tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR), including a £3.1 million grant to Imperial College London, a new antibiotic design approach, and a faster, cheaper test for fidaxomicin resistance. The initiatives target drug-resistant infections such as Klebsiella and Clostridioides difficile, while India unveiled new grants for fungal disease and AMR research.

Researchers in Imperial's Fleming Initiative have been awarded £3.1 million in funding for three years through a new programme from The Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Wellcome. The additional funding from the Gr-ADI (Gram-Negative Antibiotic Discovery Innovator) award will expand a Grand Challenge jointly announced in 2025 with GSK. The multidisciplinary project team aims to deliver a 'rulebook' to accelerate the discovery of new drug compounds to help tackle Gram-negative pathogen resistance. The initial focus on E.coli will now be expanded to include Klebsiella bacteria. Klebsiella is a common cause of healthcare infections including pneumonia, urinary infections and surgical infections, and is increasingly resistant to antibiotics. The project is one of 18 led by research teams across 17 countries. The GrADI portfolio totals $60 million and supports an integrated effort across target identification, proteomics, genetic and chemical screens, ultra-high throughput compound accumulation studies, coupled to iterative artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) modelling.

A new way of designing antibiotics, described as Efflux Resistance Breaker or ERB, is described in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry by researchers at King's College London. Many bacteria use molecular pumps, known as efflux pumps, to push antibiotics out of the cell before the drugs can reach levels high enough to kill them. The King's-led team has shown that antibiotics can be chemically redesigned so they are less easily removed by these pumps, allowing the antibiotic to remain inside the bacterial cell at higher concentrations. Unlike previous strategies that combined antibiotics with separate efflux pump inhibitors, this new approach builds resistance-breaking properties directly into the antibiotic molecule. 'Antimicrobial resistance is rising, but the number of truly new antibiotics in development remains worryingly low,' said a professor of medicinal chemistry at King's College London. The study provides a proof of concept that maintaining high intracellular antibiotic concentration can help overcome resistance, including in bacteria that already show reduced susceptibility to existing antibiotics. The researchers believe the ERB platform could be used as a general strategy to design antibiotics with built-in resilience to efflux-mediated resistance.

At ASM Microbe 2026 in Washington, D.C., researchers from Cleveland described a new method for the rapid detection of fidaxomicin resistance in Clostridioides difficile. The recipe adds fidaxomicin directly to the standard culture medium, C. difficile Brucella agar. In a study on 126 stool samples that had already tested positive for C. difficile, the antibiotic-enhanced medium correctly identified resistant isolates with 100% sensitivity. The researchers estimated that for every 1,000 patients screened, use of the new medium will save 201 hours of work and $9,075 in supplies and labor. C. difficile infections affect 500,000 people in the U.S. every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and up to 30,000 die within 30 days of diagnosis. The new approach could readily be scaled up for use at public health departments and research labs once the preliminary findings are validated.

In India, the Union government is pushing research funding to catalyse faster innovation in fungal diseases and AMR medicines. Through new funding initiatives, strengthened surveillance networks, investments in advanced diagnostics and antifungal drug discovery, the country is accelerating efforts to improve the detection, monitoring, and treatment of life-threatening fungal infections. The National Health Research Priority Projects provide grants of up to Rs. 25 crore over five years for high-impact research. MedTech Mitra, a collaborative initiative of NITI Aayog, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), and the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), aims to accelerate the development of affordable, accessible, and indigenous therapeutics, vaccines, medical devices, in-vitro diagnostics, and assistive technologies. ICMR is expanding surveillance through networks like MycoNet, with the Centre for Advanced Research offering Rs. 15 crore for 5 years, and a First in World Challenge grant of up to Rs. 8 crore to accelerate end-to-end translational research. An International Conference on Fungal Diseases and AMR organized by the Foundation for Neglected Disease Research, the University of Aberdeen, and Brigid Bio, with funding support from FAILSAFE, brought together key opinion leaders from academia, industry, ICMR and start-ups from UK and India.