October 20, 2008
K. H. Lee, PhD, the Kenan Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has been named the recipient of the 2009 Norman R. Farnsworth Research Achievement Award from the American Society of Pharmacognosy.
Lee was chosen from a pool of highly qualified candidates for his career accomplishments and his many contributions to the field of natural products. He will make an award address on June 30, 2009, during the 50th Annual Meeting of the ASP in Honolulu, Hawaii.
“Few researchers can match what Dr. Lee has done over the course of his long and distinguished career,” says Alex Tropsha, PhD, chair of the School’s Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products. “This is a great honor and a terrific way to recognize his accomplishments.”
Lee is one of the world’s leading medicinal chemists. He joined the School in 1970 and has received continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1971. His longest continually running grant, “Plant Antitumor Agents,” began in 1975 and is still ongoing.
Lee’s Natural Products Research Laboratories have generated worldwide interest and collaborations through their investigation of bioactive chemical compounds in plants—often plants and herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine—as the starting point for discovering new and more effective drugs. The NPRL has received more than forty U.S. patents. The labs have discovered more than 2,000 novel bioactive natural products and analogs, which are used as new leads to develop pharmaceutical products. A hundred of those have been chosen by the National Cancer Institute for evaluation.
Recently, Lee has drawn national attention for his work in developing PA-457, a new HIV drug whose main chemical scaffold comes from a Taiwanese herb and is also found in the bark of North American birch trees. The drug has been receiving promising results in Phase II clinical trials and would represent a new class of HIV therapy if it reaches market.
“This well-deserved recognition of Dr. Lee’s many outstanding contributions to the natural products field has been long overdue, and I am glad that it is finally coming his way,” says Heinz Floss, PhD, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Washington, who recommended Lee for the award.
The ASP, founded in 1959, is an international organization of researchers dedicated to the promotion, growth, and development not only of pharmacognosy, the study of medicines derived from natural sources. The ASP has more than 1,100 members, representing more than sixty countries.
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