Helping Chemists Discover New Antibiotics

The world is facing a crisis in treating infectious diseases, with a scarcity of new antibiotics in development to treat the growing threat of drug-resistant “superbugs”. We need new strategies to reinvigorate the antibiotic pipeline. In this Viewpoint we discuss one such approach, encouraging the community of synthetic chemists to participate in testing chemical diversity from their laboratories for antimicrobial potential. CO-ADD, the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery, offers free screening against five bacteria and two fungi with follow up hit confirmation and validation, all with no strings attached.