Professor El Sayed earned his Bachelor in Pharmacy, Master’s and Doctoral degrees in natural products chemistry/ pharmacognosy from Mansoura University, Egypt. His postdoctoral training was on marine natural products was at the University of Mississippi. Dr. El Sayed group is developing natural products for breast and other malignancies control. Dr. El Sayed group’s most important direction is the anti-breast cancer activity of olive phenolics, specifically S-(-)-oleocanthal through targeting the c-Met/HER2 receptor kinases and estrogen-α receptor. (-)-Oleocanthal recently validated by Dr. El Sayed group as an effective inhibitor of various breast cancer phenotypes locoregional recurrence. Other active projects in Dr. El Sayed laboratory include tobacco cembranoids/angiogenesis, lichen secondary metabolites and associated endophytes, PCSK9-LDLR small molecule inhibitors, Dr. El Sayed published more than 155 papers, 6 book chapters and awarded 13 patents. He has been funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Louisiana Board of Regents, Louisiana Biomedical Research Foundation, Oleolive, Louisiana Biomedical Research Network, and several other foundations totaling more than two-million US dollars in extramural funding. Professor El Sayed served on several NCI study sections and is an editorial board member in Marine Drugs and Nutrients.
Nature has been and still is the single most important source of drugs and precursors. Over the past few decades, only one FDA-approved drug discovered from high-throughput screening of combinatorial chemistry libraries. Natural products-based drugs are still major entities source among the FDA-approved drugs. My research is merging traditional natural products, advanced medicinal chemistry-drug design and molecular pharmacology themes. Under natural products, my group has documented plant, marine invertebrates, and microbial discoveries. These included isolation of major and minor novel bioactive plant-marine-microbial ingredients, computer-aided semisynthetic optimizations of bioactive natural product scaffolds with occasional total and diverted synthesis, rational drug design-optimization, and molecular pharmacological-toxicological mechanistic studies. The exceptional diversity of natural products distinguish this field researcher as capable medicinal chemist, microbiologist, and pharmacologist. In addition to breast cancer-focused assays, we can actually utilize natural products into multiple therapeutic applications guided by the molecular target of interest. I consider myself a natural products-medicinal chemistry leader based on own group scientific productivity. My laboratory published more than 155 papers, 6 book chapters, filed, and awarded 14 patents on novel natural product entities and applications.
