Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) awarded Rockefeller University a Project Grant of $798,670 under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.855) effective June 1, 2026, through May 31, 2031. This award supports investigator-initiated biomedical research focused on developing novel antibiotics through bioinformatics-guided synthesis methods targeting previously inaccessible microbial biosynthetic pathways.

The research initiative will deliver scientific advances in antibiotic discovery by combining direct nanopore metagenomic sequencing technology with synthetic bioinformatic natural products discovery methods. The project aims to overcome critical bottlenecks in traditional antibiotic discovery pipelines by accessing bacterial biosynthetic gene clusters from environmental samples without requiring bacterial culturing and by identifying functional biosynthetic pathways that remain inactive under standard laboratory conditions. The outputs from this five-year project are intended to identify nature-inspired antibiotic candidates that address the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance and advance the development of a new generation of mechanistically and structurally novel therapeutics derived from previously unexploited microbial sources.