Talk 1: Discovery and Development of Future Sustainable Drugs

Dan Stærk

Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, ds@sund.ku.dk

ABSTRACT

Nature holds all the biological solutions, biosolutions, needed for discovery and development of future sustainable drugs. However, it is challenging to find bioactive natural products in Nature’s immensely large and diverse chemical space and to turn Nature’s solutions into future sustainable chemical factories. In this lecture I will describe our hunt for future sustainable drugs in the Australian outback and the Brazilian savanna. Emphasis will be on new bioactive natural products with potential as drug leads to manage type 2 diabetes and bacterial infections. The use of advanced bioactivity-correlating technologies like ligand fishing, bioactivity-correlated metabolomics, and high-resolution inhibition profiling coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography-photodiode array-high-resolution mass spectrometry-solid-phase extraction-nuclear magnetic resonance, i.e., HPLC-PDA-HRMS-SPE-NMR, will be presented.

SHORT BIO

Dan Staerk obtained his Master of Science in Chemistry and Molecular biology/Biochemistry from University of Southern Denmark in 1997 and his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2000, where he specialized in natural products research. After a period as Assistant Professor (2000-2003) and Associate Professor (2003-2008) at Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Copenhagen (UCPH), he was appointed Professor at Faculty of Life Sciences, UCPH. Since 2012 he has been Professor in Natural Products Research at Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, UCPH, where he is also heading Copenhagen Small Molecule NMR Centre. Professor Staerk's main research interest is development and application of advanced analytical techniques for accelerated analysis of bioactive natural products in complex extracts of plants and microorganisms. This includes technologies like ligand-fishing, high-resolution inhibition profiling, hyphenated HPLC-PDA-HRMS-SPE-NMR, and metabolomics. Special interest is on bioactive natural products and peptides for treatment of metabolic diseases, but his interests also include antimicrobial compounds and efflux pump inhibitors.