Fungal Natural Products & Drug Discovery

This course follows the remarkable story of fungal metabolites that became medicines, from penicillin to cyclosporine and statins, and explains how modern discovery pipelines search for the next generation. You will learn screening strategies for fungal extracts, bioassay-guided fractionation, structure elucidation by NMR and mass spectrometry, dereplication with natural product databases, and the long pathway from an initial hit to a development candidate.

Fungi remain one of the richest sources of chemical diversity, and new analytical and genomic tools are renewing interest in them. Life science students, chemists and pharma professionals will gain an integrated view of how discovery works in practice, why most hits never become drugs, and what skills are needed at each stage. The course is grounded in historical case studies and current pipeline examples, with no promises about specific therapeutic outcomes. In your final project you will design a discovery workflow for a defined fungal source, from screening and fractionation to structure elucidation, dereplication and criteria for progressing a hit.