S107: Can natural products still drive drug discovery- or vice versa?

Proponents of natural products maintain, with good reason, that historically no other chemical resource has returned as much value in the form of new medicines to the Western world  as have secondary metabolites derived from microbial fermentation.  Certainly the search for chemical agents to treat disease has been a major driving force in the development of natural products research for more than 50 years.  Detractors maintain however, also with good reason, that natural products-based approaches are ill-suited for effective  lead generation in the current drug discovery model.  This talk will examine the basis and the merits of both of these arguments, and describe new approaches from our program  in antibody conjugation, target selection, and engineered biosynthesis which when judiciously applied, can be harnessed to leverage the unique attributes of microbial natural products for drug discovery.