Eric W Schmidt
University of Utah, UT·Chemistry
Living organisms make an enormous variety of small molecules, and nowhere more so than in the sea, where crowded, competitive habitats favor chemical defenses. Many of these compounds are produced not by the animal itself but by symbiotic bacteria living inside it, and several have become approved drugs or drug leads.
- Fields
Chemistry
Microbiology & Immunology
Pharmacology
- Topics
natural products
symbiosis
symbiotic bacteria
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- Determine whether individual marine natural products are made by the animal, its symbiotic bacteria, or another organism, and define the biosynthetic pathways that assemble them.
- Test what makes certain biosynthetic pathways diversity-generating, able to produce millions of variants from one scaffold, and use those features to design compounds and express them in different living cells for synthetic biology.
- Discover natural-product ligands from animals and their microbiomes that act on single subclasses of somatosensory neurons, such as those sensing cold or mechanical pain, by applying compounds to natural mixtures of sensory cells.
- Test the therapeutic efficacy of selected sensory-neuron ligands in strategically chosen animal models of disease, including chronic pain conditions.
- Characterize the physiological targets and off-targets of candidate sensory compounds, working with medicinal chemistry to refine them as tool compounds or drug leads.
- Identify new antibacterial natural products from animal-associated symbiotic bacteria and determine their mechanisms of action against lethal human pathogens.
- Improve the potency and properties of a chemically novel antibacterial scaffold active against Acinetobacter baumannii through chemical synthesis.
More about the research
Work here asks how such chemical diversity is generated and how to put it to use in medicine. Three projects connect: tracing who makes marine natural products and how diversity arises, using animal-derived compounds to act on single types of sensory nerve cells involved in pain, and mining symbiotic bacteria for selective antibiotics.
Why it matters
People with chronic neuropathic pain or cold allodynia, where mild cold becomes painful, could eventually benefit from drugs that act on only the sensory neuron types involved. Patients facing multidrug-resistant infections, including the undertreated pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii, could gain less toxic antibiotics. Methods for producing designed molecules in living cells may also support pharmaceutical synthesis and cell-based therapies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Madan Kharel
University of Maryland Eastern Shore, MD·Biochemistry
Identify the biosynthetic building blocks of manzamine A's beta-carboline unit and five-ring core using isotope incorporation experiments in Micromonospora sp. M42.
Joshua Pierce
North Carolina State University, NC·Chemistry
Develop scalable, short synthetic routes to antimicrobial natural product families including polycyclic guanidines, oxazolidinones, curvulamines and abyssomicins, producing enough material for biological testing.
Kevin Tidgewell
University of Kentucky, KY·Pharmacology
Isolate bioactive compounds from Cameroonian medicinal plants such as Paullinia pinnata by fractionating extracts and testing each fraction for binding to sigma-2/TMEM97, a calcium-regulating protein linked to pain.
The school
University of Utah: 58 labs on PI Pages, $789M a year on research, 366 research doctorates a year.
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