Full title: Cures for Malaria, Tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s? An Update on Natural Products Discovery at HBOI

About the Speaker

Dr. Amy Wright is formally trained as an organic chemist and has spent the past 35 years exploring the chemistry of marine organisms with the goal of identifying natural products with the potential to change how we treat dread diseases. Much of her work has focused on organisms collected in deep water habitats using tools such as the Johnson-Sea-Link submersibles. She received her B.S. from California State University at Dominguez Hills and her MSc and Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of California at Riverside.

About the Lecture

Wherever there is biological diversity there is chemical diversity and this diversity leads to opportunities for finding new medicines. Many plants, marine animals and microbes produce small organic molecules, “natural products”, that provide advantages to the organisms that make them which range from attracting mates to repelling or even poisoning predators.

These same natural products often show activity in human health applications and over 46% of the small molecule medicines used today have their origin in natural products. The talk will discuss the HBOI natural products library and how we are using it to look for new compounds with the potential to treat cancer, tuberculosis, multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, and Alzheimer’s disease.