About Us

Who We Are

Natural products from bacteria represent one of the largest sources of pharmaceuticals throughout the history of medicine. Microbial Pharmaceuticals has developed a platform, metabologenomics, that allows us to study all of the compounds that a class of bacteria produces rather than focusing on a single compound at a time. This leads to the identification of totally new compounds, new but similar to known compounds (called derivatives), and known compounds. We can group all the related compounds together and provide a visual network through NPkinect, our innovative software, to allow partners to browse our library and select the compounds that they are interested in studying. These natural products could be used as lead compounds for the development of pharmaceuticals or used for gaining a better understanding of how diseases (such as cancer) can be targeted for treatment.

Meet the Team

Anthony W. GoeringCEO

Anthony Goering is the CEO of Microbial Pharmaceuticals. He earned his Ph.D in Biology from Northwestern University, developing and using new methodologies to discover new natural products. Originally from the glacial plains of Minnesota, he earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota, and participated in the award-winning 2010 iGEM team. At Microbial Pharmaceuticals, he applies his enthusiasm for technology to stimulate scientific advancement.

Board of Directors

Neil L. Kelleher

Neil Kelleher has established himself as one of the preeminent mass spectrometrists in the world. His research has focused on combining proteomics and metabolomics in innovative ways to provide a deterministic platform to feed compounds from the natural world into future pharmaceutical pipelines. Over the past decade, he has led the discovery projects for over two dozen new natural products and their biosynthetic gene clusters. Recently, Kelleher has worked with other co-founders of Microbial Pharmaceuticals to establish a new approach to study natural products, metabologenomics. He has also managed the successful launch of computer software (ProSight PTM and ProSight Lite) for proteomics data analysis. Neil is the President of Microbial Pharmaceuticals and is an avid basketball player.

William W. Metcalf

William W. Metcalf is a microbiologist, who specializes in the use of genomic data to guide genetic, biochemical and physiological analyses of diverse microbes. Dr. Metcalf currently serves as the William G. Arends Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, where he has been a member of the Department of Microbiology since 1997. His research program centers on the investigation of microbial metabolic processes with biomedical, biotechnological and environmental ramifications. Drs. Metcalf and Kelleher have engaged in a long-term collaboration to develop and streamline the genome-mining approach used by Microbial Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Metcalf has served as director of the Cold Harbor Spring Laboratories’ Advanced Bacterial Genetics course and the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratories’ Microbial Diversity Course. He is currently theme leader for the Mining Microbial Genomes group at the Institute of Genomic Biology at UIUC and is an Editor for the Journal of Bacteriology.

Regan J. Thomson

Regan brings over 15 years of experience in natural products research to the team at Microbial Pharmaceuticals. Since 2006, he has been a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University where his research group has worked extensively on the total synthesis of diverse families of bioactive natural products, including alkaloids, terpenes, peptides, and lignans. His long-standing interest in biosynthesis has led to a vigorous collaborative effort with Prof. Neil Kelleher on the discovery of new, bioactive molecules from bacteria and fungi. Regan brings his expertise in natural product structure elucidation, synthesis and biosynthesis to the Microbial Pharmaceuticals goal of providing the first road map of microbial secondary metabolism.