Dr. Cedric Pearce
Dr. Cedric J. Pearce, CEO/CSO, Mycosynthetix, Inc., Hillsborough, NC
Co-Investigator, Project 3
Dr. Pearce has spent his entire career working on biologically active microbial products, both in academia and in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. In 2001, he acquired one of the largest collections of filamentous fungi in the world, with over 100,000 isolates. Subsequent quality control and auditing of the samples realized a library of 55,000 high quality and viable cultures of filamentous fungi. All of these samples are barcoded, and all mycological, biological, and chemical data about specimens are organized in a relational database. At the same time as the acquisition, he founded Mycosynthetix, Inc. with a mission of using its fungal library for discovery purposes. Dr. Pearce has leveraged this unique library of fungal cultures by collaborating with biologists with exciting new bioassays that might help uncover new lead compounds, and natural product chemists with the capability to quickly identify these active metabolites. The focus of Mycosynthetix, Inc. has been primarily in three areas: cancer, infectious diseases, and agricultural pesticides. With Dr. Oberlies in Project 3, this work had been directed to the discovery of fungal metabolites with potential anticancer activity for the past decade, and, together, hundreds of
compounds have been identified, including four that are in various phases of preclinical development, inclusive of verticillin A.