Despite the availability of antifungal drugs, these infections have a mortality rate of around 40%. Other concerning species include Candida glabrata, which has caused a continuously increasing number of identified cases over the last years , and Candida auris, a recently discovered new species. Since its first appearance in 2009, C. auris has already been identified in over 30 countries across 6 continents. C. auris is causing considerable concerns because it generally displays resistance against at least one class of antifungal drugs, and in some cases resistance against all three major antifungal drug classes (polyenes, azoles and echinocandins). Indeed, the 2019 Centre's for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on "Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States" already lists C. auris as an 'Urgent Threat", with 90% of isolates resistant to at least one antifungal, and 30% resistant to at least two antifungals. Reported cases increased 318% in 2018 when compared to the average number of cases reported in 2015 to 2017. Despite their growing threat to global health, the current development pipeline for antifungal agents is even sparser than the already meager antibacterial drug landscape, with fewer than ten drugs in various phases of clinical development. Promisingly, some of these compounds represent new classes with novel modes of action but with the high attrition rates of compounds in clinical trials, only a few of them can be expected to be approved for clinical use in the coming years. To prevent drug-resistance from overwhelming the capabilities of the global healthcare system, a richer and more diverse antifungal drug-pipeline is urgently needed. While all current antifungal drugs and antifungal drug candidates are exclusively organic molecules, metal-containing compounds have been a cornerstone of medicine since the beginning of the 20 th century. Today, metal complexes are present mainly in the field of anticancer therapies where platinum-based drugs (e.g. cisplatin) are still the most frequently used chemotherapeutics, despite having been introduced over 40 years ago. Since then, metal compounds that contain titanium, iron, copper, gallium, molybdenum, ruthenium, palladium, silver, gold and bismuth have entered clinical trials. Indeed in 2020, twelve metal complexes were in clinical trials for anticancer indications alone. In the field of infectious diseases, the iron-based antimalaria drug-candidate ferroquine has, after a long developmental history, advanced to phase II clinical trials. Unfortunately, the combination of ferroquine with artefenomel, a new trioxolane drug candidate, did not meet the defined efficacy criteria in this trial. Recently, the Thomas group has described a series of dinuclear ruthenium complexes with promising antimicrobial properties that are now being developed for pre-clinical evaluation as part of a spin-off company. While metal-based drugs are still a niche field, the recent increase in both in-depth studies as well as preclinical and clinical investigations into this class of compounds highlights a bright future ahead. Metal complexes offer two sets of properties that set them apart from their purely organic counterparts. Firstly, transition metals, in various oxidation states and not bound by the valency limitations of carbon, can combine with a myriad of different organic ligands, with coordination numbers from 2 to as high as 15, forming highly diverse three-dimensional structures. The combination of the many transition metals with the array of possible organic and inorganic ligands, opens an entire realm of chemical space that is not otherwise accessible, and provides the 'escape from flatland' that has been advocated by medicinal chemists. It has been reported repeatedly that a higher 3D character in lead-candidates correlates with higher clinical success rates. The superior geometrical diversity of metal complexes has recently been demonstrated elegantly by Morrison et al. In their work, the authors showed that a small library of 71 metallofragments (metal complexes with fragment-like ligands) cover a significantly larger volume of the available three-dimensional chemical space compared to a representative organic fragment-library containing 18,000 molecules. The second "ace-up-the-sleeve" for metal complexes is their ability to access many different and unique modes of actions. These range from redox reactions, generation of reactive oxygen species or catalytic generation of other active species, ligand exchange or triggered ligand release. This is in addition to acting as general competitive or covalent (coordinative) inhibitors or binding agents for proteins and enzymes. Different metals, and different types of metal complexes, are likely to have widely varying, and potentially multiple, modes of action. Overall, there are many ways for metal-based drugs to make a significant difference in the field of medicine and complement the organic drug arsenal currently available to us. Some metals, such as silver, have long been known to possess antimicrobial properties, with some metal-ion formulations being approved for antimicrobial applications. However, there have been only few systematic studies of anti-infective metal complexes until recently. In the last few years, several research groups, including ours, have published a number of reports on the promising antibacterial properties of metal complexes. We recently reported the first systematic study on the antimicrobial properties of >300,000 molecules, focusing on ~1000 metal-containing compounds in the dataset. These data were collected via the crowd-sourced Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery initiative (CO-ADD, co-add.org), funded by The Wellcome Trust and the University of Queensland. CO-ADD offers chemists around the world the opportunity to have any chemical entities from their laboratories screened for antimicrobial activity, free of charge. In this analysis we found that metal-containing complexes displayed significantly superior hit-rates (9.9%) compared to purely organic molecules (0.87%). As the CO-ADD screening includes cytotoxicity and haemolysis assays for initial hits, it was possible to compare the overall toxicity rates of metal-based with organic molecules as well. Promisingly, we found that the toxicity rates for both classes were nearly identical, undermining the commonly held belief that metal-containing compounds are inherently (more) toxic. Figure . Selected structures of metal complexes with reported antifungal activity containing iron (1 , 2 , 3 36 , 4 ) , cobalt (5 28 , 6 ), palladium (7 ), gold (8 ), manganese (9 ), nickel (10 42 , 11 ), ruthenium (12 ), rhenium (13 ), and iridium (14 )