Even as antimicrobial resistance is expected to continue to grow, the development of much-needed novel antibiotics and antifungals remains trapped in a catch-22 in which funding is available for early stage research but not necessarily for the translational work necessary to bring the drugs to market.

Aligos Belgium presented research on ALG-005398, a first representative of a series of non-heteroaryldihydropyrimidines (HAPs) class I capsid-assembly modulators, that was identified using structure-based drug design and scaffold hopping.

A newly developed messenger RNA vaccine is the first such approach to elicit acquired resistance against the tick Ixodes scapularis and prevent it from transmitting the Lyme disease vector Borrelia burgdorferi in guinea pigs, according to a U.S. study led by researchers at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.