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Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed an efficient process to rapidly discover new "enediyne natural products" from soil microbes that could be further developed into extremely potent anticancer drugs.

The study highlights microbial natural products as abundant sources of new drug leads. The researchers' discovery process involves prioritizing the microbes from the TSRI strain collection and focusing on the ones that are genetically predisposed to produce specific families of natural products. The scientists say this process saves time and resources in comparison to the traditional approaches used to identify these rare molecules.

The study, led by TSRI Professor Ben Shen, was published in the journal mBio.

Shen and his colleagues uncovered a new family of enediyne natural products, called tiancimycins, (TNMs) which kill selected cancer cells more rapidly and completely in comparison to toxic molecules used in FDA-approved antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) -- monoclonal antibodies attached to cytotoxic drugs that target only cancer cells.

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