Drug Discovery Seminar - Barry O'Keefe, PhD

The NCI Program for Natural Products Discovery

The US National Cancer Institute’s Natural Product Repository is one of the world’s largest, most diverse collections of natural products containing over 230,000 unique extracts derived from plant, marine and microbial organisms that have been collected from biodiverse regions throughout the world. Importantly, this national resource is available to the research community for the screening of extracts and the isolation of bioactive natural products. However, despite the success of natural products in drug cancer discovery, compatibility issues that make crude natural product extracts challenging have reduced enthusiasm for the high-throughput screening (HTS) of crude natural product extract libraries in targeted assay systems. To address these limitations and make the NCI’s Natural Products Repository more amenable to HTS, we have initiated the NCI Program for Natural Product Discovery (NPNPD). NPNPD goals include the prefractionation of extracts using a newly- created automated, high-throughput robotics platform capable of generating a library of 1,000,000 partially purified extracts. In addition, automated secondary purification and structure elucidation platforms have been created that significantly increase the efficiency of drug discovery from natural products. The presentation will discuss these mechanisms to increase the utility of natural products in drug discovery and outcomes so far from the NPNPD.

Date: Friday, November 12
Time:  09:00AM
Location:  ZOOM

Zoom:  https://msu.zoom.us/j/98508621581

Passcode:   083646

Host:  Joseph Nichols (nicho621@msu.edu)