S155: Synthetic biology platforms for advancing natural product synthesis and discovery

Natural products and compounds derived from or inspired by natural products comprise most successful drugs. But, their discovery, synthesis, and scalable manufacture remain ad hoc, biased, and tedious. As a result, many proposed drug candidates cannot be seriously explored or tested, and the number of successful new drugs that further improve human health has remained stagnant or decreasing year after year. Advances in synthetic biology hold promise to address many of the challenges between natural product drug discovery and therapeutic application. I will discuss several recent synthetic biology advances that provide new molecular tools for pathway optimization and discovery.