FDA Approved Drug Library Screening Identifies Robenidine as a Repositionable Antifungal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New antifungal therapies have been imperative, largely due to the increasing burden of fungal infections worldwide, limited arsenal of available antifungal compounds, and the emergence of drug resistance among a variety of pathogenic fungi. In this study, we screened a library of 1068 FDA-approved drugs to identify hits that exhibit broad-spectrum antifungal activity. Robenidine, an anticoccidial agent which has been widely used to treat coccidian infections of poultry and rabbits, was identified in the screening. Physiological concentrations of robenidine were able to significantly inhibit yeast cell growth, filamentation and biofilm formation of Candida albicans, the most extensively studied human fungal pathogen associated with infections in immunocompromised patients. Moreover, we observed a broad-spectrum antifungal activity of this compound towards fluconazole resistant clinical isolates of C. albicans and a wide range of clinically relevant fungal pathogens as well. Intriguingly, the robenidine-treated C. albicans cells conferred hypersensitivity to diverse cell wall stressors and analysis of the cell wall structure by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) showed that cell wall was severely damaged by robenidine, both implying that this compound may target the cell wall integrity signaling pathway. Indeed, after robenidine treatment we found a dose dependent increase in the phosphorylation of cell wall integrity marker Mkc1 which was decreased after long exposure. Furthermore, we provided evidence by RNA-seq and qPCR that Rlm1, the downstream transcription factor of Mkc1, may represent a potential target of robenidine. Therefore, our data suggest that robenidine, a FDA approved anti-coccidiosis drug, displays a promising and broadly effective antifungal strategy and represents a potentially repositionable candidate for the treatment of increasing fungal infections.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Bench or experimental | high |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Bench or experimental | high |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".