{"id":889,"date":"2016-06-29T12:09:27","date_gmt":"2016-06-29T16:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/?p=889"},"modified":"2017-07-20T10:51:47","modified_gmt":"2017-07-20T14:51:47","slug":"nih-funds-bu-cmd-to-develop-new-antifungal-compounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/2016\/06\/29\/nih-funds-bu-cmd-to-develop-new-antifungal-compounds\/","title":{"rendered":"NIH Funds BU-CMD to Develop New Antifungal Compounds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a four-year grant to Center for Molecular Discovery researcher Lauren Brown and collaborators <a href=\"http:\/\/individual.utoronto.ca\/cowen\/\">Leah Cowen<\/a> (University of Toronto) and <a href=\"http:\/\/lindquistlab.wi.mit.edu\/members\/\">Luke Whitesell<\/a>\u00a0(Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT) on &#8220;Targeting Hsp90 in crytococcal fungal pathogenesis.&#8221; The assembled team combines expertise in fungal biology (Cowen), medicinal chemistry (Brown) and pharmacology\/experimental therapeutics (Whitesell) with the goal of developing drug-like small-molecule probes for use in studying disease mechanisms of the fungus Cryptococcus.<\/p>\n<p>Invasive Cryptococcus infections pose a grave threat to human health and have enormous economic consequences. Cryptococcal meningitis, the major clinical manifestation of the disease, has a 100% mortatlity rate if left untreated. Even with the best available therapies, mortality rates remain high at 35-40% due to a limited number of drug classes available, and compromised usefulness of these drugs caused by both dose-limiting toxicity and the emergence of high-grade antifungal drug resistance.<\/p>\n<p>In this project, the team will collaborate to develop small molecule chemical compounds to study a critical molecular mechanism that supports both fungal virulence and the onset of drug-resistance. These compounds will also impact clinical care by serving as promising leads for the future development of new, more effective antifungal drugs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a four-year grant to Center for Molecular Discovery researcher Lauren Brown and collaborators Leah Cowen (University of Toronto) and Luke Whitesell\u00a0(Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT) on &#8220;Targeting Hsp90 in crytococcal fungal pathogenesis.&#8221; The assembled team combines expertise in fungal biology (Cowen), medicinal chemistry (Brown) and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11617,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[11,14,9,13,10,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11617"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":892,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889\/revisions\/892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cmd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}