Researchers in Imperial’s Fleming Initiative have been awarded new funding through a global programme to help transform the discovery of new antibiotics and tackle the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Bringing together expertise in infectious disease, microbiology, chemistry and machine learning, the team will receive £3.1 million in funding for three years through a new programme from The Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Wellcome.
The award highlights the continued success of the Fleming Initiative and Imperial working with multiple partners to unlock convergent science funding to tackle major global scientific challenges. This additional funding from the Gr-ADI (Gram-Negative Antibiotic Discovery Innovator) award will expand one of the key Grand Challenges jointly announced in 2025 with GSK, the first founding partner of the Fleming Initiative, and underpins the growing global interest in this collaborative approach to AMR research.
The multidisciplinary project team, convened through the Fleming Initiative – a partnership between Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust – aims to deliver a ‘rulebook’ to accelerate the discovery of new drug compounds to help tackle tackle Gram-negative pathogen resistance. The initial focus on E.coli will now be expanded to include Klebsiella bacteria with the additional Gr-ADI funds.
Dr Andrew Edwards, from the Department of Infectious Disease and the Centre for Bacterial Resistance Biology at Imperial College London, said: “We’re delighted to receive this funding, which will help to further accelerate our research. We urgently need new antimicrobials to tackle the growing threat of drug-resistant infections. Klebsiella is a common cause of healthcare infections, and is frequently resistant to antibiotics. Through collaborations between academia, industry and charity, and co-ordinated by the Fleming Initiative, we’re supporting the development of new antibiotics by addressing a major biological hurdle: breaking through bacterial defences to get the drugs inside the cells, where they can kill them.”
Klebsiella is a common pathogen which causes a range of healthcare infections including pneumonia, urinary infections (UTIs) and surgical infections, and which is increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Researchers will identify new antibiotic targets and determine how to get drugs into the bacterial cell, which is a major challenge due to the complex bacterial cell envelope.
Dr David Payne, from GSK, said: “We are delighted that the vital work we have initiated with Fleming to address Gram-negative pathogen resistance is attracting new interest and additional funding. The Grand Challenges we announced last year are designed to create much needed impetus on the key scientific challenges in AMR, and this new investment shows that we are already doing that with our Fleming partnership."
This project is one of 18 led by research teams across 17 countries. Successful projects have been based on their potential to transform antibiotic discovery for Gram-negative bacteria, one of the leading drivers of AMR-related deaths worldwide.
The project continues a highly successful collaboration between Imperial’s Departments of Chemistry, Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Computer Science and Mathematics. It also benefits from critical infrastructure, including the Imperial Drug Discovery Hub and London BioFoundry for experimental work, and high‑throughput mass spectrometry through the Agilent Measurement Suite (AMS) at Imperial’s White City campus.
