Dr. Tim Cernak

In large part, these diseases are ones that we understand really well.

You know, cancer, for example, or infectious diseases.

And, you know, there are some cancers that we can make medicines for quite quickly today.

I mean, COVID hit, right?

And 18 months later, we had a drug.

So I think that these technologies that have been bubbling up for drug discovery, of course, AI, you know, has accelerated things, got me thinking, like, well, what if there was disease in a turtle or a tree or a butterfly?

Like, could we...

do anything about that situation.

Could we prevent the extinction of this creature?

So the one that we spend a lot of attention on is chytrid.

This is a fungal disease that's driving the extinction of frogs across the globe.

It's a global event.

It's been described by many as the biggest pandemic on our planet.

But it's not known to impact mammals in any way, so you hear less about it, right?

But you can kill this fungus with some of our broad-spectrum antifungal agents.

The problem that I have is that the dosing window is really narrow for those broad-spectrum agents.

And so there's plenty of studies that show that frogs have been overdosed to death with this old-school antifungal.

The other challenge is that it's an immunosuppressant.

And so you treat the frogs, but then there's a hypothesis that when they get back out into the wild after having being treated with this drug, they are more susceptible to the disease.

So as someone with a background in pharmacy, I'm like, well, could we find a different option here that doesn't have these design flaws?