Biology-Driven Synthesis – from Marine Natural Products to Commercial Leads
Infectious diseases are a leading cause of death worldwide and are traditionally treated with antibiotics. Today, society faces an urgent need for new antimicrobial agents and strategies due to the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria leading to infections that cannot be treated with antibiotics. This research proposal aims to develop new antimicrobial agents based on marine bioactive compounds. The project is a multi-disciplinary collaboration of scientists from the four Norwegian universities in Tromsø, Bergen, Stavanger and Trondheim (UoT, UoB, UoS and NTNU) acting together with the biodiscovery centre at UoT (MabCent-SFI) - a Centre of Research Based Innovation on Marine Bioactives and Drug Discovery. The research team consists of specialists in organic synthesis, drug design, biochemistry, microbiology and more. Herein, we outline a systematic approach for developing bioactive natural products, isolated and characterized by scientists at MabCent, into lead compounds for new antimicrobial agents. Discovery of other bioactivities associated with the natural products and their synthetic derivatives will also be followed up through the MabCent consortium. The original structure will be systematically modified to gain an understanding of the structural features that are important for the biological activity through structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies. This will involve the following steps: (1) development of efficient synthetic strategies, (2) preparation of a natural product focused library of compounds, and (3) biological screening and investigation of the library. We aim at a close interaction between activities in synthesis and biological screening, i.e. compounds prepared will be screened consecutively, and thus biological data will continuously be feed into the design process. In essence, biology will be in the driver seat and the research will move forward in an iterative process.
Project facts
Name
Biology-Driven Synthesis – from Marine Natural Products to Commercial Leads
Status
CONCLUDED
Duration
01.05.13 - 31.12.17
