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New funding has been awarded to Imperial through a global programme to help transform the discovery of new antibiotics and tackle the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

The funding is awarded through the Gram-Negative Antibiotic Discovery Innovator (Gr-ADI) consortium and is supported by the Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation and Wellcome. It builds on the launched in 2025 through the partnership between and the . The project brings together expertise in chemistry, microbiology, genomics and machine learning to address one of the biggest obstacles in antibiotic discovery: getting drug molecules inside resistant Gram-negative bacteria.

Professor Ed Tate and Imperial colleagues will help develop new experimental and computational tools to understand how small molecules enter bacterial cells and identify the chemical properties that improve antibiotic accumulation. The expanded programme will now include studies on Klebsiella, a common pathogen which causes a range of healthcare infections including pneumonia, urinary infections (UTIs) and surgical infections, and which is increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

Using high-throughput mass spectrometry and AI-based modelling, the team aims to generate an open “rulebook” that will guide the design of future antibiotics. The resulting datasets and predictive models will be shared with the wider scientific community to accelerate progress across the field.