Frederick Annang

I was part of a research network called ParaMet, a Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) sponsored by the 7 framework of the European Commission with the primary objective of expanding on our current understanding of the biology of the protozoan parasites involved in Chagas diseases, Human African Tryponosomiasis, Leishmaniasis and Malaria with the possibility of finding novel therapeutic agents for combating and possibly eradicating this debilitating tropical diseases. In my current project at Fundacion MEDINA we are using high throughput screening and state-of-the-art chemistry to explore the natural products world with the aim of finding potent novel compounds against these diseases. Fundación MEDINA makes available for screening one of the world’s most productive collections of filamentous fungi, actinomycetes and unicellular bacteria for drug leads (above 110,000 strains and 130,000 extracts). This collection has been built up over the years to satisfy needs for natural product chemical libraries for a multinational pharmaceutical company and therefore pursued the functional objective of incorporating a broad cross-section of the known cultivable secondary metabolite producing actinomycetes and fungi, some of which have been thoroughly annotated with chemical and biological data.