Natural Products, Medicinal Plants & Marine Drugs

Shugeng Cao has his expertise in biologically active natural products from different sources, initially from plants, then from fungi and bacteria, and lately more on marine microorganisms. Besides drug discovery from natural sources, he is also interested in investigating the functions of small molecule natural products and studying secondary metabolites in the fields of ecology and agriculture. At the Cancer Center and Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy,University of Hawaii, his lab has collected about 300 bacterial and about 3,000 Hawaiian fungal strains from soil, marine and plants (called endophytes), and established a natural product library with more than 5,000 semi-pure fractions. In the past few years, Cao Lab has isolated more than 50 new natural products, some of which have new structure skeletons and showed good

anti-proliferative activity.