Research students awarded 2022 best paper

On December 27, 2022, pharmacy research students were awarded the Omura Award signifying they had published the best paper of the year.

The award, which is named after 2015 Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine Satoshi Ōmura, was presented for the paper "Role of symbiosis in the discovery of novel antibiotics" that appeared in The Journal of Antibiotics.

MUSC Ph.D. students Xiaoyan Chen and George Hanna were on the paper with co-authors Vedanjali Gogineni, Dian Mayasari, and MUSC Cooper Endowed Chair in Pharmacy Mark Hamann.

Mayasari  also has an MUSC pedigree -- she trained at the Gadjah Mada University College of Pharmacy Indonesia and came to the MUSC College of Pharmacy as part of an exchange program to help train GMU students in research and manuscript preparation! 

From the paper's abstract:

Virtually, all currently used antibiotics can trace their genesis to soil derived bacteria and fungi. The bacteria and fungi involved in symbiosis is an area that still remains widely unexplored for the discovery and development of new antibiotics. This brief review focuses on the challenges and opportunities in the application of symbiotic microbes and also provides an interesting platform that links natural product chemistry with evolutionary biology and ecology.