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Bill Gerwick
Research Interests
• Characterizing the ‘weird and wonderful’ natural products
of marine algae and cyanobacteria
• Drug discovery from marine organisms
in diverse therapeutic areas; parasitic
diseases, cancer, neurosciences,
Carmaphycin B, a low nM
proteasome inhibitor
inflammation
• Developing a mechanistic and genetic understanding of
the biosynthesis of marine cyanobacterial natural products
• Developing marine microalgae as a source of sustainable
biofuels
• Development of new methodologies in mass spectrometry
and NMR spectroscopy as applied to
natural products
Bill Gerwick
Core Expertise
• Scuba diving/collecting in tropical reef
environments
• Isolation and structural characterization
of bioactive organic molecules
• Genome sequencing and bioinformatics of cyanobacteria
for their natural product pathways
• Development of new methods in NMR and mass
spectrometry applied to small molecule structural
analysis
• Biological assays of small molecules (cancer cells,
inflammation (NO), molluscicidal, neurotoxicity)
• Synthesis of natural products and analogs
Proposed Collaborations with SSPPS Faculty
• Medicinal chemical exploration of some of our most
promising marine natural product drug leads
• Analytical chemical support to clinical pharmacy projects
(e.g. new drug metabolites, other bioactive compounds)
• Drug discovery using innovative biological assays and
our rich compound/fraction/extract collection (around 850
pure and structurally defined compounds, more than
3,000 fractions representing >30,000 compounds)
• Development of new analytical methods involving NMR
and MS platforms