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Welcome to the Eustaquio Lab website! We are part of the Department of Medicinal Chemistry & Pharmacognosy and the Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology of the College of Pharmacy at UIC. Our lab is located in the Molecular Biology Research Building.

We are interested in addressing questions related to drug discovery and development from natural sources, in particular from microorganisms. Natural products (or specialized metabolites) play a crucial role in human health. About half of the medicines we use today have their origin in plants, fungi, bacteria and other organisms. Nevertheless, limited access from natural sources coupled with difficulties in altering their chemical structure – which is usually necessary to improve pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties – represent the main challenges of natural product drug discovery and development. Our lab aims to contribute to a) addressing the supply problem and b) generating structural diversity not found in nature but desirable for pharmaceutical applications by using biosynthetic engineering and genomic approaches.

 

Website administrators: Maryam Muhammad, Sylvia Kunakom