Extremophile-Sourced Targeted Antifungals for Textile Applications to Promote a Healthy Skin Microbiome

CFD Research Corporation (CFDRC) has a unique metagenomic platform for harnessing the potential of natural products (NPs) from understudied extremophilic microbiomes. This project will exploit our extremophilic microbiome drug discovery (EMDD) platform by state-of-the-art (SOTA) synthetic biology methods to discover novel targeted antifungals in a high throughput manner. Target/commensal specificity will be measured by minimum inhibitory and lethal concentration (MIC/MLC) assays against targets: Trichophyton rubrum, Trichophyton mentagrophytes, and Epidermophyton floccosum, and commensals: Malassezia furfur, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Micrococcus, and Propionibacteria. The specificity goal is a 2-fold lower MIC and/or MLC in targets compared to commensals over 24 hours. Targeted antifungal(s) will undergo further purification and chemical analysis by mass spectrometry to characterize the compound(s). Finally, production will be optimized and scaled up, and best textile application methods determined for the targeted antifungal molecules.