Dr. Joshua Kellogg (Chemistry and Biochemistry) received new funding from the National Institutes of Health for the project “Complex Natural Product Mixtures Against Drug Resistant Infections: Targeting Multiple Pathways to Combat Bacteria.”
According to the abstract, many dietary supplements are used in the form of complex mixtures, and their purported efficacy is often attributed to the presence of multiple constituents with combined activity greater than that of individual metabolites. Such mixtures can potentially target multiple pathways to exert their effects. Indeed, pharmaceutical combination therapy approaches have become standard interventions for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and malaria. The complexity of dietary supplements poses a major challenge, and there is currently a lack of knowledge for many of these supplements as to the mechanisms that underlie their biological effects, and whether activities observed at the cellular level translate into more complex model systems. Very few studies have investigated whether components of a complex mixture work in combination to affect a phenotypic response. The goal of these studies is to conduct both in vitro and in vivo studies to evaluate the mechanisms that underlie biological activity of a complex natural product mixture.
