About the conference:
Natural products have served as the starting point for a significant proportion of small-molecule commercial drugs, including broad-spectrum macrolide antibiotics, the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, the immunosuppressant FK506, and modified rapamycins, which are currently in clinical trials for the treatment of kidney cancer.
However, in recent years, the global pharmaceutical industry has drastically scaled back its efforts in the discovery of natural products in favor of other approaches.
This presents both an opportunity and a challenge for university researchers and small spin-off companies to demonstrate that natural products continue to offer unique advantages as medicines.
This talk will outline the mission of a University of Cambridge spin-off company in synthetic biology that aims to address this challenge by utilizing enzymology of polyketide assembly pathways and non-ribosomal peptide biosynthesis.
Resume:
Prof. Peter Leadlay is the Herchel Smith Professor at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom). He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich.
He has published more than 240 articles on enzymology, particularly in the fields of biosynthetic enzymology and bacterial antibiotic engineering.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000 and has been awarded the Chaire Blaise Pascal Prize (Paris), the Remsen Prize (ACS), the Celltech Medal (RSC), the Smets Chair (Leuven), the Inhoffen Medal from the Helmholtz Foundation (Braunschweig), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Prize (Berlin).
Prof. Leadlay is also a co-founder and non-executive director of the biotechnology company BIOTICA.