Do you have a white whale of wildlife diseases?

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

Uh, this is a fungal disease that's driving the extinction of frogs across the globe.

It's, it's a, it's a global event.

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

Uh, and but, you know, y- it, it's not known to impact mammals in any way, so the, 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, the, is that the dosing window is really narrow, uh, for those broad-spectrum agents, and so, so it, there's plenty of studies that show that frogs have been overdosed, uh, to death with this, with this, you know, old school antifungal.

Besides Pebbles, can you give me one more example of, um, w- wildlife where you have intervened?

Stay curious.

My name is Tim Cernak.

I'm a professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Michigan, and I'm launching an area of research we call conservation chemistry.

We hope that we can make medicine to prevent the extinction of endangered species.

So I spent a career in the pharmaceutical industry before coming into this role, and I saw the power of chemistry to improve health, thinking about diseases like cancer or COVID or diabetes.

I mean, we've gotten really good recently in making medicines for such afflictions in humans.

And when I looked at ecosystem health, I was shocked by how, how urgent I think the need is to improve ecosystem health.