24 August 2012

Thursday 9th of August, the day before USP’s Open Day, will go down as a very special day in the history books for the Institute of Applied Sciences “Center for Drug Discovery and Conservation” (CDDC) unit. They were hosting Nobel Prize winner (Chemistry) Professor Suzuki from 9-10.30am for some discussions centering on his famous reaction and presentations of the unit made to discuss their relentless efforts to discover new potential drug leads from marine bacteria, algae and invertebrates. Prof Suzuki was impressed about the work and the laboratory set-up at lower campus.

Prof. Aalbersberg, the director of IAS, took his Japanese colleague to a tour at IAS and said he was indeed honored of hosting this special guest. Both then stayed on to attend a presentation by Dr Patrick Colin, the famous author of the book: “Tropical Pacific Invertebrates: A field guide to the marine invertebrates occurring on tropical Pacific coral reefs, seagrass beds and mangroves.” He presented a talk on the history of the National Cancer Institute’s marine collections program: “Integrating taxonomy, zoogeography and drug discovery”, which is in many ways similar to the CDDC work. He also indicated his willingness of collaborating with the IAS team including a possible collection trip to the Solomon Islands early next year. The following discussions were led by Prof. Randy Thaman.