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 Gram-negative pathogen resistance. The initial focus on Escherichia 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 causes a range of 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 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.
The Imperial project will provide a blueprint, highlighting new targets for drug molecules as well as how to design new and effective drugs. This will include open datasets, predictive ML models for compound accumulation, a tailored compound library and a proteome scale atlas of vulnerabilities in Klebsiella, enabling researchers to design molecules that can reach and disable key bacterial targets.
Findings will be freely available to research groups around the world, helping to accelerate antibiotic discovery by delivering tools and knowledge that details new targets for drugs and how to design new drug molecules.
The announcement comes ahead of a global summit on AMR in Australia this month, where the Fleming Initiative will convene stakeholders from academia, government and industry to drive action on political commitments on AMR and progress the field.