Bacterial infections and tumor cells are proliferating due to rising levels of resistance against current drugs. The major focus of the Elshahawi lab is to discover and develop natural products-based drug therapeutics for the treatment of tumor cells and infectious diseases and modifying those therapeutics for improved activity and/or pharmacokinetic properties. Research in the Elshahawi lab lies at the interface of chemistry and biology and combines multiple disciplines including natural products chemistry, microbiology, biochemistry, genetics, bioinformatics, structural biology, synthetic chemistry and molecular biology. The goal is to utilize natural product compounds, genes and enzymes to provide new drug leads against bacterial infections and cancer to strengthen the drug discovery pipeline.
Dr. Elshahawi’s research is focused on four main areas: (i) Isolation of microorganisms from untapped environments capable of producing biologically active small molecules; isolation and structure elucidation of these compounds using various spectroscopic techniques (ii) Identification of the genes, enzymes and mechanisms involved in the biosynthesis of bioactive natural products (iii) Characterization and engineering of late stage tailoring enzymes for drug diversification for improvement of bioactivities and/or physicochemical properties (iv) Identification of the chemical arsenal of pathogenic organisms and their biosynthetic machinery.
