Back row (L to R): Brandon Young, Brett Prigaro, Chandraiah Lagisetti, Stacey
Davis, Vince Boyd, Jake Slavish
Front row (L to R): Jeanine Price, Gustavo Palacios, Amanda Joyner, Thomas R.
Webb, Tino Goronga, Brandi Baughman, Parimala Hanumesh
Research in the Webb laboratory is focused on application of medicinal chemistry technology to lead discovery and chemical biology. Cancer lead discovery and lead optimization is a particular focus in the Webb laboratory encompassing a new target area in cancer; lead discovery for a novel modulators of the spliceosome and alternate mRNA splicing based on a natural product consensus pharmacophore for multiple cancer types. Additionally we are actively pursuing the development of chemical biology tools for the elucidation of the widely used, but poorly understood, schistosomiasis drug, Praziquantel. Synthetic organic parallel and medicinal chemistry are the major tools used in our laboratory, molecular tool and lead design and synthesis are facilitated by integration with the high throughput chemistry core. Our laboratory also has ongoing research in the development of cheminformatics and molecular modeling tools for the applied de novo design of ligands and new combinatorial templates based on pharmacophore information. Additionally the above efforts are complemented by an ongoing interest in the application of the most advanced work in organic synthesis and compound analysis and purification via application of enantioselective and diastereoselective synthesis and chiral supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), respectively.