Company reports antifungal compounds that evade resistance
REVOLUTION Medicines, Inc., a company focused on the discovery and development of innovative drugs derived from natural compounds, announced that progress in antimicrobial drug discovery was published today in Nature Chemical Biology by the company's academic founder and scientific advisory board chairman, Martin D. Burke, M.D., Ph.D., professor of chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Early Career Scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The paper titled "Non-toxic antimicrobials that evade drug resistance" reports on new chemical entities derived from the natural product amphotericin B, which has been used for more than 50 years as a highly effective treatment for serious fungal infections that is often accompanied by serious side effects. The novel compounds were active against fungal pathogens that cause life-threatening human diseases, effective in treating a rodent model of systemic yeast infections, and significantly less toxic to human cells than the parent natural product. Unlike many antifungal...