# A novel drug retargeting platform for drug-resistant bacterial infections

> **NIH NIH R21** · TRUDEAU INSTITUTE, INC. · 2021 · $247,500

## Abstract

Abstract
Absent new treatment options, bacteria evolve to develop resistance to existing drugs and
spread rapidly across the globe. Thus, there is a strong need to identify drugs that: 1) act on
bacterial pathogens via novel molecular targets, and 2) are chemically unrelated to clinically
used antibiotics. Our innovative approach is designed to meet both of those criteria. Here we
propose a novel, general platform to drug discovery that differs from both traditional phenotype-
and target-based strategies, and requires a small fraction of the usual costs of drug discovery.
Specifically, our proposed drug discovery platform leverages recent advances in bacterial
systems biology and builds on large-scale analysis of the mechanisms of action of approved
and experimental drugs developed for various indications. Three recent technological advances,
coupled with the extensive relevant experience of the key personnel, underlie the proposal: (i)
next-generation sequencing, transcriptomic, and metabolomic analyses support precise
delineation of the mechanism of action for anti-bacterial drugs; (ii) recent commercial
implementation of small molecule shape-comparison methods on GPUs dramatically increase
the scale of problems amenable to accurate computational chemistry analysis; and (iii) careful
curation of public resources and availability of proprietary databases of approved and
experimental drugs enable analysis of large sets of clinical molecules with pre-defined
properties. The innovative drug discovery platform proposed herein is designed to identify novel
targets, and to discover and develop drugs to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections. In order to
establish the feasibility of the approach, we propose to develop drugs working via novel
mechanisms of action (MOA) against innately antibiotic-resistant Mycobacterium abscessus.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10086955
- **Project number:** 5R21AI144386-02
- **Recipient organization:** TRUDEAU INSTITUTE, INC.
- **Principal Investigator:** Felix B Sheinerman
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $247,500
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-01-21 → 2022-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10086955

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10086955, A novel drug retargeting platform for drug-resistant bacterial infections (5R21AI144386-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10086955. Licensed CC0.

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