OHAMR Call for proposals 2026

General Information

• Type: Partner looking for project
• Organisation: KULeuven
• Country: Belgium (BE)
• Career stage: Early Career Researcher (up to 8 years** since PhD).

Research area

• Scientific area(s) of the call:
  1. Topic 1: Identify and develop new combination treatments using existing or innovative antimicrobials or antimicrobial with adjunctive treatments to extend drug efficacy and combat resistance.
• One Health Setting:

  H - Human Health

• Keywords:

  tuberculosis; clinical isolate collections; in vitro and in vivo infection models; WGS; LC-MS/MS

• Brief description of your expertise / expertise you are looking for:

  We are the academic drug discovery group within the Laboratory of Clinical Microbiology at Leuven University Hospital (Belgium), led by Prof. Emmanuel André. Our work focuses on developing new antibiotics for tuberculosis (TB) and non-tuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) infections. We have recently built a fully integrated preclinical drug-testing platform, featuring automated high-throughput screening infrastructure in BSL-3 (“Caps-IT”), a broad range of basic and advanced in vitro models (MIC/MBC, time-kill, biofilm, intracellular macrophage, hypoxia, clinical isolate challenge panels, and alveolar lung organoids), and in vivo infection systems (Galleria and mouse models, with non-invasive longitudinal BLI and µCT imaging). This biology platform is supported by in-house WGS for resistance profiling and LC-MS/MS capabilities for pharmacokinetic and PK/PD studies.

• Brief description of your project / the project you would like to join:

  We aim to collaborate with academic or industry partners developing existing or novel therapeutics for combination therapy against drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a WHO priority pathogen under the scope of Call Topic 1. We offer our full suite of preclinical TB infection models to evaluate the partner\'s new combination treatment in terms of efficacy, safety, PK/PD, and resistance emergence/suppression. Although our core expertise lies in small molecules, we are also open to projects exploring alternative therapeutic strategies - including peptides, lysins, phages, anti-virulence approaches, and adjunctive agents. In addition to TB, our interests extend to CRAB and MRSA, and we are happy to discuss the setup of custom in vitro or in vivo infection models for ESKAPE pathogens tailored to project-specific needs.

Gert-Jan Wijnant

• Organisation: KULeuven
• Position: Research Manager
• E-mail: gert-jan.wijnant@kuleuven.be
• Web: gbiomed.kuleuven.be/english/research/50000698/50000623