Natural products chemistry has been an important area of research that fortifies much of the discovery of modern pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and veterinary therapeutics. The progress in natural products has hugely improved modern healthcare and quality of life. The challenge to make new discoveries and to continually improve and extend the coverage provided by safe, effective and available therapeutics demand the involvement of specialized expertise in the tools and methodology of natural products and bio-discovery. With over 18 years of experience in natural products chemistry dealing with isolation, characterization and biological evaluation of small molecules from terrestrial plants, micro-organisms, cyanobacteria and eukaryotic algae Dr. Ratnayake will continue her quest to identify and characterize compounds from natural sources that promise new advances in pharmacology. She will make use of the infrastructure at the Center for Natural Products, Drug Discovery and Development (CNPD3) and the UF Health Cancer Center in a collaborative effort towards finding new therapies and identifying new drug candidates for cancer treatment, while addressing multiple issues on drug discovery ranging from assay development, fractionation, isolation, de-replication strategies and screening.
Over the years natural products have provided an important cohort of structural scaffolds for drug discovery and development critical for cancer therapy and treatment. Complimentary to the advances in technology, it is imperative that we continue to seek for newer, more efficacious and safer drugs by mining our natural sources more effectively.
| Cai, Weijing; Ratnayake, Ranjala; Gerber, Michael H et al. (2018) Development of apratoxin S10 (Apra S10) as an anti-pancreatic cancer agent and its preliminary evaluation in an orthotopic patient-derived xenograft (PDX) model. Invest New Drugs : |
| Paciaroni, Nicholas G; Ratnayake, Ranjala; Matthews, James H et al. (2017) A Tryptoline Ring-Distortion Strategy Leads to Complex and Diverse Biologically Active Molecules from the Indole Alkaloid Yohimbine. Chemistry 23:4327-4335 |
| Kim, Bumki; Ratnayake, Ranjala; Lee, Hyunji et al. (2017) Synthesis and biological evaluation of largazole zinc-binding group analogs. Bioorg Med Chem 25:3077-3086 |
