The ever-increasing antimicrobial resistance coupled with the diminishing antibiotic pipeline demands constant efforts for the discovery and development of durable antibiotic therapeutics. Our group applies various complementary research strategies to address the problem of antibiotic resistance. The first is the rational chemical modification of existing obsolete antibiotics to impart additional modes of action thereby enhancing their bioactivities. Targeted natural product drug discovery driven by resistance-guided genomic mining/screening is another strategy that we focus on for the identification of novel antibiotic scaffolds. Further, we are interested in developing novel small molecular therapeutics, and antibiotic adjuvants that enhance the efficacy of antibiotics by directly targeting the bacterial resistance mechanisms.

Research areas:

Medicinal chemistry, drug design, and development.

Natural product drug discovery and their biosynthesis.

Bioactivity-guided natural product purification and characterization.

Genome mining and genome engineering.

Infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, antibiotics.