Inspired by nature’s biodiversity, chemistry professor Ben Shen, Ph.D., is empowering researchers globally to fight cancer, antibiotic resistance and other challenges with the help of his powerful new database of microbial natural products.
A Luminary in Natural Product Discovery
Ben Shen is the founder of The Natural Products Discovery Center at The Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology. He is also one of the most influential natural product chemists in the world, exploring the genomes of tiny microbes to discover new hope for people with cancer and other diseases.
Shen has dedicated his career to understanding nature’s biochemistry so that millions of years of evolution can be harnessed to help humanity. He has built the Natural Products Discovery Center at The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute, a premier resource and searchable database of biodiversity. Researchers globally are exploring the collection for possible antibiotics, agricultural products, cancer-fighting drugs and more.
Shen’s own research focuses on a type of soil bacteria called Actinomycetota. It’s a group of microbes with a storied history, helping produce blockbuster medicines like tetracycline and rapamycin, used to treat pneumonia, skin infections, Lyme disease, and to improve the success of organ transplants.
Shen and his team have, of necessity, invented new chemistry tools to reconstruct the collection’s complex natural products in the lab, a critical step for drug development. Their methods are now widely used to create potential new medicines and other useful products.
Unlocking a Historic Treasure
The Natural Products Discovery Center has its roots in science history. In 2018, Shen responded to a pharmaceutical company’s request for proposals on how to best use a massive, century-old collection of over 125,000 microbial strains. The strains had been gathered early in the 20th Century by explorers hoping to discover the next penicillin. However, the technology did not yet exist to read the strains’ genomes. For decades, much of the collection remained unstudied, stored in -80oC freezers, in liquid nitrogen dewars, or in vacuum sealed glass vials.
Shen proposed a modern approach to probing its riches: use genomic sequencing to rapidly mine the collection for gene clusters that encode natural products, and add them to a database accessible to scientists everywhere. Shen’s vision won out, and the collection was moved to Jupiter, Florida, where a team of students and scholars now work daily to unlock its full potential.
Startling Discovery, Uncommon Impact
Through their studies, Shen and his team found that a single microbial strain can conceal as many as 30 new chemical entities. That meant their collection might contain millions of chemical substances totally new to science. Their work has already uncovered thousands of novel natural compounds, many of which show significant antibiotic and anticancer potential.
Over a career spanning 35 years, Shen has co-authored 312 scientific papers cited nearly 26,800 times. His discoveries have resulted in 13 patents, including promising anticancer drug candidates.
Mentoring Students
Shen’s influence extends far beyond his own lab. He has trained 86 postdoctoral researchers and mentored 5 M.S. and 16 Ph.D. students, 65 of whom have gone on to their own successful academic careers. He has also provided invaluable hands-on experience to 39 undergraduate students and high school interns.
The open-access database he envisioned has become a global success. As of November 2025, it had been used by more than 1,100 researchers from 50 different countries, democratizing access to this rich natural resource and fostering worldwide collaboration.
The Future of Natural Product Science
Looking ahead, Shen sees artificial intelligence and machine learning as the key to transforming his field. He predicts this new era will allow researchers to rationally target and exploit the structural complexity of natural products, dramatically speeding up the path from discovery to life-saving therapies. In a 2024 essay for the journal Nature Chemical Biology, he wrote, “We are truly on the brink of transforming natural product discovery.”
Further Reading: Opening Nature’s Biodiversity to Science
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