Fundacion medina, a public-private model for microbial natural products drug discovery

Microbial natural products (NPs) represent one of the most successful sources of drugs to treat human diseases. Despite the current need of novel drugs, NPs discovery programs have been gradually abandoned by the big pharma, and smaller biotechnology companies and research organizations are clearly taking the lead in the discovery of novel NPs.

Fundación MEDINA is a non-profit research organization established as a spin-out from the transfer of the NPs drug discovery research programs of Merck & Co in Spain, in partnership with the University of Granada and the Government of Andalucia (Spain). MEDINA leverages the experience of more than 50 years in NPs drug discovery and has inherited one of the world's largest and most productive NPs screening libraries. MEDINA is currently developing new approaches to further exploit the potential of its huge microbial resources as source of novel compounds, to mine for orphan biosynthetic pathways, or to isolate novel species thought to be uncultivable, as part of the drug discovery programs. These activities are developed in combination with high throughput chemical dereplication and semi-automated methods for the isolation and structural elucidation of novel bioactive NPs. These innovative approaches will be presented together with the new challenges faced in the current drug discovery framework to address the isolation of novel bioactive NPs and the generation of novel screening libraries enriched in chemical diversity.