The University of Manchester and F2G Ltd, a privately-held antifungal drug discovery and development company and today announced the start of a 6.1 million euro EU-funded project to discover and develop novel antifungal drugs to treat serious, life-threatening fungal infections.
The NOFUN project is a collaborative project under the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission which brings together five partners to accelerate the development of a number of F2G's broad spectrum antifungal agents.
About two million people die each year because of fungal infection and resistance is rapidly emerging to the most common drugs used to treat these diseases. This project aims to develop novel agents with completely new ways of acting in order to combat the increasing tide of drug resistant fungal infections. NOFUN will use F2G's discovery assets and the University's fungal genomics platforms in addition to the drug development and characterisation expertise of the other partners.
Participants in the NOFUN Project are F2G Ltd (UK), The University of Manchester (UK), Pharmacelsus GmbH (Germany), OncoTargeting AB (Sweden) and Universitat i Rovira Virgili (Spain).
Dr Mike Bromley, NOFUN Project Coordinator from The Manchester Fungal Infection Group at The University of Manchester, said: "We are delighted that this project has been funded and it confirms The University of Manchester as a centre of excellence in fungal biology and disease. Hopefully this cash boost will help us to create new treatments to tackle serious, life-threatening fungal infections."
Dr Mike Birch of F2G and Scientific Coordinator of NOFUN added: "Competition for funding in this call was immense and the NOFUN award represents a significant validation of the project and the partners. F2G is delighted to lead the scientific program to develop much needed new antifungal agents".