Dr. Bradley Moore, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor
Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Professor
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

brad moore
Bradley S. Moore, Ph.D.

Pronoun:   He|Him|His

Email
bsmoore@ucsd.edu
Phone
(858) 822-6650
Support

Human Resources

Lydia Heidt (formerly Napa)
lnapa@health.ucsd.edu
858-822-7861

Research Summary

Dr. Moore's laboratory is focused on understanding the fundamental mechanisms and pathways involved in how microbes produce antibiotics, anticancer agents, and other bioactive natural products, with a special emphasis on marine microorganisms. Research is performed at the chemistry-biology interface and involves a number of sophisticated approaches that include heterologous biosynthesis, mutasynthesis, chemoenzymatic total synthesis, genome mining, and in vitro and in vivo biochemical analysis. Biosynthetic systems are largely targeted from marine microbes, which harbor promising natural product compounds such as the potent anticancer agents salinosporamide A and didemnin, the polyketide antibiotics taromycin and marinopyrrole, and the neurotoxins domoic acid and kainic acid.

Microbial biodiversity remains one of the last great biotic frontiers, and developing effective strategies to discover and exploit new small molecules from this resource is integral to the success of future drug discovery efforts. The introduction of recombinant technology to the natural product discovery process has allowed us to interrogate and manipulate biosynthetic processes in order to expand the biosynthetic capabilities of microbes to yield new chemical entities for biological evaluation. 

Academic Achievements

Education: B.S. in Chemistry (1989) University of Hawaii; Ph.D. in Bioorganic Chemistry (1994) University of Washington. 

Awards and Honors: ASP Matt Suffness New Investigator Award (2001); NIH SBCB Study Section founding member (2005-8); Novartis-MIT Lecturer in Organic Chemistry (2009-10); Fellow of the Royal Society for Chemistry (2010); Chair of the Natural Product Reports Editorial Board (2011-2018); President of ASP (2013-2014); Chair of the 2014 Marine Natural Products GRC; ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2013); ETH Visiting Faculty Award (2014); Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2017); Novartis-UC Berkeley Lecturer in Organic Chemistry (2017); RSC Natural Product Chemistry Prize (2018); C. Richard Hutichinson Lectureship, University of Wisconsin (2019); Alexander M. Cruikshank Lecture Award in Chemistry, GRC on Marine Natural Products, 2019; Norman R. Farnsworth Research Achievement Award, American Society of Pharmacognosy, 2021; Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products, American Chemical Society, 2021.

Teaching
  • Pharmaceutical Chemistry (SPPS 221).
  • Pharmaceutical Biochemistry (SPPS 223).
  • Seminar in Marine Natural Products (SIO 262).
  • Special Topics in Marine Natural Products (SIO 264).
Key Contributions
  • Pioneered the biosynthesis and bioengineering of marine natural product drug leads.
  • Developed genome mining and synthetic biology techniques for the rational production of new antibiotic and anticancer drug leads.
  • Discovered antibiotic biosynthesis and resistance enzymes and elucidated their mechanisms enzymology.
  • Decoded the first harmful algal bloom neurotoxin.
Potential Collaborative Programs
  • 20 years of experience in the discovery and application of natural products and their biosynthetic enzymes and genes.
  • Broad array of chemical, biochemical and genetic approaches to understanding and bioengineering the biosynthesis of natural product drugs and toxins.