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The Kersten Lab at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy focuses on discovering new plant-based chemicals to cure human diseases. For millennia, humans have explored the plant kingdom for ways to alleviate pain, treat injuries, and heal diseases. Ancient herbal medicines have derived from this botanical exploration, leading to the development of small chemicals known as plant natural products, which have resulted in therapeutic drugs to treat cancer, infectious diseases, and manage pain. The Kersten Lab draws inspiration from these plant natural products to discover new chemical solutions for treating human diseases. Utilizing a combination of activity-guided discovery and gene-guided approaches, the lab aims to unveil new plant chemistry with therapeutic potential. Their goal is to overcome challenges in natural product drug discovery and development, including the rediscovery of known chemistry, scalable production of lead structures in a sustainable manner, and optimization of lead structures for enhanced bioactivity. The lab employs an analytical toolbox that includes bioinformatics, mass spectrometry-based metabolomics, proteomics, and synthetic biology to tackle these challenges and develop libraries of plant natural products for pharmaceutical evaluation.
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science