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  • NEWS AND VIEWS

New antifungal breaks the mould

A bacterium makes a molecule that kills drug-resistant fungi in an unusual way — by targeting various phospholipid molecules in membranes.
By
  1. Arun Maji

    1. Arun Maji is at the College of Pharmacy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40536, USA.

  2. Martin D. Burke

    1. Martin D. Burke is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.

Drug resistance in disease-causing fungi is a big problem in public health and can result in death from the infections1. Fortunately, the issue of resistance is not new — bacteria have presumably been fighting a similar battle since the emergence of fungal cells as competitors about two billion years ago2. With echoes of the reciprocal evolution of military technologies3, bacteria have evolved small-molecule products that slow the growth of fungi or kill them, and fungi adapt by developing tactics for resistance to these natural substances. The cycle continues as bacteria respond with increasingly sophisticated molecular weapons4. Some of the natural products that emerged from such co-evolution have been discovered and used as clinical treatments, and writing in Nature, Deng et al.5 report the discovery of an antifungal molecule that might have therapeutic relevance.

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Nature 640, 606-607 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00801-0

References

  1. Lee, Y., Robbins, N. & Cowen, L. E. npj Antimicrob. Resist. 1, 5 (2023).

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  2. Vosseberg, J. et al. Nature 633, 295–305 (2024).

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  5. Deng, Q. et al. Nature 640, 743–751 (2025).

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  6. Gray, K. C. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, 2234–2239 (2012).

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  7. Anderson, T. M. et al. Nature Chem. Biol. 10, 400–406 (2014).

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  8. Maji, A. et al. Nature 623, 1079–1085 (2023).

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  9. Guo, X. et al. ACS Cent. Sci. 7, 781–791 (2021).

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  10. Ju, K. S. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 12175–12180 (2015).

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  11. Culp, E. J. et al. Nature 578, 582–587 (2020).

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Competing Interests

A.M. and M.D.B. are inventors on patent applications related to glycosylated macrolide antifungals, including AM-2-19/SF001. M.D.B. is a shareholder for Sfunga Therapeutics (now Elion Therapeutics), which has licensed these patent applications from the University of Illinois.

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