Roughly half of the drugs in clinical use today started as natural products — molecules that evolved inside microorganisms and plants that form the backbone of antibiotics, anti-cancer agents and other medicines.
Over the past decade, the University of Michigan has become a leader in natural product sciences.
The U-M Natural Products Discovery Core has developed a 40,000-sample (and growing) library of natural product extracts derived from a unique collection of diverse marine and terrestrial actinomycetes, fungi and cyanobacteria. The core provides researchers at U-M and external partners with the technology and expertise to develop candidates identified through high-throughput screening into unique, bioactive, patentable, small molecules.
Rapid genomic and metabolomic profiling allows users identify high value molecules as probes and drug leads.
Recent investments by the U-M Biosciences Initiative will add state-of-the art mass spectrometry and NMR resources for structure elucidation, as well as the recruitment of new faculty and specialists.
Announcements
Welcome to our new Program Co-ordinator, Jennifer Soules! She'll be working with the NPDC and Natural Products initiative to support a exciting new and productive natural products drug discovery program at U-M.
BSI grantee David Sherman presented as the keynote speaker at the Structural Biology and Biochemistry (STBB) 2019 Program Symposium, “Translating Structural Biology to Medicine: Natural Products for Drug Discovery” on May 1, 2019 at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus.
BSI grantee David Sherman spoke as a plenary lecturer in Copenhagen at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Symposium on the Discovery, Biosynthesis and Application of Natural Products.
The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), an international community of professionals and students dedicated to life sciences discovery and technology, has awarded NPDC Director Ashootosh Tripathi with the prestigious SLAS Tony B. Academic Travel.
NPDC Director Ashootosh Tripathi chaired a session on " Small Molecule Libraries" and was an invited speaker in the recently concluded SLAS Annual National Meeting 2019, Washington DC. His talk was titled “Development of a Millennial Drug Discovery Platform using Microbial Treasure Trove."
Pardon our dust! We're excited to be working on the web pages for the newest LSI core laboratory.
Our Services
More than 40,000 natural product extracts collected around the globe. Available for high-throughput screening in the U-M Center for Chemical Genomics.
Bioactive molecule identification using traditional bio-assay guided fractionation, as well as new data-guided discovery tools. Small-molecule structural characterization. Optimization for creating intellectual property.
Ability to do high-throughput molecular characterization of enzymatic products, and analysis using rapid separation technologies.
Biosynthetic cluster mining of microbial genomic DNA. Artificial-intelligence & machine learning-based genome-to-natural-product technologies.
Featured News
Biosciences Initiative invests $45M in U-M research
Three ground-breaking LSI projects are among the University of Michigan projects to be funded in the first round of investments from President Mark Schlissel’s Biosciences Initiative.