# Cyanobacterial pseudo-natural products for anticancer drug discovery

> **NIH NIH SC2** · UNIVERSITY OF PUERTO RICO MED SCIENCES · 2022 · $150,000

## Abstract

PROJECT ABSTRACT
Cyanobacteria produce secondary metabolites have been well-documented to possess
potent and selective anticancer activity, which has resulted in FDA approval of a
cyanobacterial antibody-drug-conjugate (ADC) for the treatment of several Hodgkin
lymphomas. Even though this highlights the critical role of natural products in the drug
discovery, the novelty of structural scaffolds has largely remained steady in the last two
decades. Therefore, we aim to design and synthesize a pseudo-natural product library
inspired by cyanobacterial metabolites with well-described anti-cancer activity to expand
their molecular coverage. Our pseudo-natural product library will develop and describe
uncharted chemical space that integrates privileged scaffolds while employing medicinal
chemistry approaches, such as combinatorial chemistry and parallel synthesis. We will
qualitatively and quantitatively characterize our library using modern computational,
machine learning and metabolomic techniques, to compare it with natural products and
FDA-approved drugs. The long-term goal of this research is to generate a chemical library
rich in natural product scaffolds that are biased towards cancer tissue for drug discovery
and development. Our main hypothesis is that our library will contain chemical
architectures embedded with biological properties of privileged cyanobacterial structures
that describe new chemical space.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10487571
- **Project number:** 5SC2GM144152-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PUERTO RICO MED SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** Eduardo Javier Caro
- **Activity code:** SC2 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $150,000
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-09-10 → 2024-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10487571

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10487571, Cyanobacterial pseudo-natural products for anticancer drug discovery (5SC2GM144152-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10487571. Licensed CC0.

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