Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery
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The Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD) is a not-for-profit initiative created in 2015 reaching out to chemists in academia and research organisations who have compounds that were not designed as antibiotics and would not otherwise be screened for antimicrobial activity. These academic compounds are screened against a key panel of drug-resistant bacterial strains -superbugs. Multi-drug resistant microbes are a serious health treat, and exploration of novel chemical diversity is essential to find new antibiotics. [1] [2] [3] [4]
CO-ADD's goal is to find new, diverse compounds to combat the superbug crisis in screening chemical compounds for antimicrobial activity against key ESKAPE pathogens, E. coli, K. pneumoniae, A. baumannii, P. aeruginosa, S. aureus (MRSA), as well as the fungi C. neoformans and C. albicans.
CO-ADD is supported by the Wellcome Trust through a Strategic Award and The University of Queensland (Institute for Molecular Bioscience), where the compound screening facilities are located.
CO-ADD is a community-driven solution to the superbug crisis problem, providing chemists with:[citation needed]
- an open access antimicrobial drug discovery platform
- a low-barrier access to free antimicrobial screening
- a program to uncover and test chemical diversity sitting on chemists’ shelves
- a communal knowledge base for antimicrobial discovery
