Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) awarded The Leland Stanford Junior University a $421,456 Project Grant under the Biomedical Research and Research Training program (CFDA 93.859) for "Discovery and Engineering of Therapeutics from Plants," effective July 1, 2026 through March 31, 2031. This award supports fundamental research to characterize plant natural product biosynthetic pathways and translate findings into therapeutic development. The project builds on prior institutional success in elucidating biosynthetic mechanisms for clinically-used drugs including colchicine, galantamine, and taxol, and applies this knowledge across multiple classes of plant metabolites spanning significant chemical diversity.

The deliverables under this award include identification of proteins that coordinate biosynthetic pathways to enable bio-based production of new therapeutics in heterologous hosts, mechanistic characterization of plant natural products functioning as pathway intermediates or in combination, and discovery of novel plant molecules capable of modulating animal development. A primary outcome will be sets of biosynthetic genes usable for engineering biosynthetic pathways to produce analogs and non-natural derivatives with enhanced therapeutic efficacy. This research addresses a critical gap in leveraging plant-derived compounds currently isolated from natural sources or plant cell cultures and converted through semisynthetic routes, enabling more efficient and scalable production methods for essential medicines.