Midwest Bioprocessing Center lands $1.8M NIH grant

In Illinois, Midwest Bioprocessing Center (MBC), a leading producer of biobased chemicals for human health, nutrition, and personal care announced that it has been awarded a $1.8MM grant from the National Institutes of Health entitled “Production of Natural Deoxysugars for Use in Chemical Synthesis of Glycosides.”

The technology being developed will allow the company to produce important deoxysugars for pharmaceutical drug discovery applications. These specialized sugars are often important structural components of bioactive natural products, such as antibiotics and anticancer therapeutics.  Although they are of increasing interest to drug discovery researchers who want to test the effect of altering sugar substituents on the therapeutics that they are developing, deoxysugars are often difficult or impossible to synthesize using current chemical technologies.