Laboratory of Chemistry of Microbial Metabolites

Oncological diseases and bacterial infections are the cause of death of millions of people every year in both developing and developed countries. According to statistics, cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world after cardiovascular diseases, claiming more than 9 million lives annually. Despite significant progress in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer in recent decades, at the moment, the treatment of oncopathologies is still very problematic both due to the lack of effective drugs and due to the presence of serious side effects of existing drugs. The intensive use of antibiotics in recent decades has led to the fact that there are currently a number of strains of pathogenic bacteria against which most of the available antibiotic drugs are ineffective. More than 30,000 people die annually in the EU alone from infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria. And this situation is getting worse every year. This project is aimed at finding new effective antitumor agents and antibiotics among the metabolites of fungi isolated in the Vietnamese part of the South China Sea. Within the framework of the project, large-scale screening of extracts of marine fungi and individual compounds from them is carried out using a previously developed system for determining the mechanism of action of antibiotics. The structures of individual compounds are established using modern physico-chemical methods. In addition, the protivo-tumor effect of the isolated compounds on human prostate cancer cells is being investigated. As a result of the project, it is expected to find new promising antibiotics and antitumor agents.