Synspired

Natural products are important providers of drug leads in the occidental society and have played key roles in biological sciences and medicine due to their privileged ability to interact with life components. However, it is obvious that they cannot be sustainably purified from harvested living organisms, on the large industrial scale, for socio-economical purposes. Access to pharmaceutically relevant natural compounds or improved analogues can thus mainly be obtained by chemical (synthetic chemistry) and/or biological (synthetic biology) means. Meanwhile, the increased incidence, the recrudescence and the emergence of old or new diseases worldwide (especially in Europe or the entire occidental society) – like cancer, viral, microbial multi-drug resistant infections, age-related neurological disorders or diabetes – impose new efficient strategies to discover and develop new drug leads, and thus impose new productive challenges to synthetic chemists and biologists. Even old drug repositioning which is today systematically considered by pharmaceutical companies may be limited, while personalized medicines and biological therapies are in no way generalizable, rendering the search of new molecules with unmatched chemical space (which is a characteristic of natural products) more than ever needed. During this ANR MRSEI project, ten academic partners from four European countries and additional non-academic actors will be invited to join an educational research proposal centered on medicinal natural product synthetic chemistry and biology, to apply the European MSCA-ITN-2017-ETN call. The Synspired ANR program will be co-funded by the GDRI i-NPChem launched on January 2016 to provide the best conditions needed for a successful tentative. The ANR financial support will be used to organize scientific and management meetings aiming at the preparation of our European project, as well as specific missions for French partners in the same way, and the organization of a Summer School in 2017 to anticipate or kick off the European ITN project.