Joshua Pierce
North Carolina State University, NC·Chemistry
Bacteria that shrug off existing antibiotics are an urgent public health problem, and historically many drug classes have come from natural products, complex molecules made by microbes, plants and marine organisms. The catch is supply and access: these molecules are often available only in tiny quantities from their natural source, and their intricate structures resist easy chemical construction, so they cannot be made in the amounts needed for biological testing or modified to see which parts matter.
- Fields
Chemistry
Microbiology & Immunology
Pharmacology
- Topics
total synthesis
natural products
synthetic methodology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Develop scalable, short synthetic routes to antimicrobial natural product families including polycyclic guanidines, oxazolidinones, curvulamines and abyssomicins, producing enough material for biological testing.
- Invent new chemical reactions and strategies for assembling complex molecules, with the aim that they prove useful for targets beyond these natural product families.
- Make structural analogs of the synthesized natural products and test their antimicrobial and anti-biofilm activity, biofilms being the surface-attached bacterial communities that resist clearance.
- Use the synthesized natural products and analogs as chemical probes in in-house chemical biology studies to determine their mechanism of action against clinically relevant disease models.
More about the research
This program works on that bottleneck from the chemistry side, inventing new reactions and synthetic strategies that make complex molecules reachable in practical quantities, then using the resulting compounds to probe how they kill bacteria.
Why it matters
Resistant bacterial infections and aggressive cancers both need new treatments, and natural products have supplied many drug classes over the past century. Practical synthetic routes to these antimicrobial natural products could make otherwise scarce molecules available as chemical probes and as starting points for drug development, while the new reactions developed could help chemists build other complex molecules more efficiently.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Filippo Romiti
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Chemistry·Early-career
Develop a catalytic chemoselective amide reduction combined with a Friedel–Crafts coupling, which joins two alkaloid units directly, and show its use in short syntheses of the bisindole alkaloids kopsoffine and pleiomutine.
William Wuest
Emory University, GA·Chemistry
Synthesize inhibitors inspired by the natural product peniciaculin, which likely mimic the cofactor ubiquinone, and test them against blight-causing plant pathogens using organic synthesis and microbiology.
David Sarlah
Rice University, TX·Chemistry
Develop a stereoselective olefination, a double-bond-forming reaction that controls 3D shape, to efficiently build the strained [5.3.2] bicyclic ring system of the cripowellin alkaloids.
The school
North Carolina State University: 40 labs on PI Pages, $717M a year on research, 603 research doctorates a year.
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