Expanding the scope of natural product discovery from novel chemical structures to novel biological functions
Natural products, their semisynthetic derivatives, and compounds inspired by them account for a majority of approved prescribed antibacterial and anticancer small molecules, and they remain a rich source of pharmacologically novel scaffolds and targeting modalities. Yet the rate of new scaffold discovery has fallen, as extensively mined reservoirs return known chemistry with traditional methods at ever-higher rates. The consequence is a thin pipeline where need is most acute, in chemoresistant cancers, and in antibiotic-resistant infection, both of which still lack selective effector molecules. This talk will present our philosophy on how to best use natural products discovery in the search for new precision human therapeutics. Our thesis is that the scope of discovery needs to be expanded from small molecule discovery to discovery within vast chemical ecologies, to systems-based perturbogenic screening in mixtures of cells biopsied for patients, to molecular target discovery, and back to clinical translation science.
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For any questions, please contact Hyacinth Camillieri at hcamillieri@gc.cuny.edu.