Sulfonium-decorated antifungals break the mold

News The latest chemistry news, including important research advances, business and policy trends, chemical safety practices, career guidance, and more. Read More Far fewer drugs fight fungal infections than bacterial infections, which means it’s an especially troubling problem when fungi resist treatment.

With that in mind, scientist have tweaked the chemical structure of an existing antifungal compound to quell Cryptococcus neoformans , a potentially deadly fungus that naturally resists caspofungin and related drugs ( J. Med. Chem.

2026, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6c00945). Dongliang Guan , a medicinal chemist at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues attached positively charged sulfur groups, called sulfoniums, to pneumocandin B 0 , a compound used to make the antifungal drug caspofungin.

The modification is inspired by earlier work on antibiotics; researchers previously added sulfonium to the popular antibacterial drug vancomycin to improve its efficacy and make it less susceptible to resistance. In total, the researchers made 34 different sulfonium-modified pneumocandin B 0 derivatives and then gauged their antifungal potential.