Natural Products Discovery Institute

Biotechnology ResearchPennsylvania, United States11-50 Employees

The Natural Products Discovery Institute (NPDI) was established in June 2011 as a result of an unprecedented gift by Merck and Company of its entire U.S. Natural Products Library and the Schering-Plough Legacy Culture Collection to the Institute for Hepatitis and Virus Research (IHVR). Together, this is one of the largest, most diverse, and most carefully developed natural products collections in the world. The current collection has been put together utilizing some 7,500 plant specimens and 20,000 micro-organisms. It contains some 80,000 screen-ready samples. The NPDI is dedicated to making productive use of one of the world’s greatest collections of Natural Products. The NPDI will be a long term resource for the discovery and development of products of biological origin and will provide industry standard follow-up chemistry to support bioassay driven structure identification and elucidation. It will preserve, expand, perform research on, educate, and make available this previously private collection of natural products to qualified researchers in academia and industry. We expect that this research activity will lead to the discovery of novel molecules with biological activity and to the formation of new life sciences companies that will seek to commercialize discoveries centered on natural products. Businesses would include those developing pharmaceutical, nutritionals, flavor enhancers, cosmeceuticals, and agricultural products.

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