Ben Shen, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry
Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology
Chemist Ben Shen has dedicated his career to understanding nature’s biochemistry, so that its gifts and methods can be used to benefit humanity.
Shen directs the Natural Products Discovery Center at the Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology in Jupiter, Florida. This historic collection of more than 125,000 microbial strains was collected over decades by scientists hunting for potential new medicines, following the discovery of penicillin.
Shen’s research focuses on a type of microbe known for producing useful natural products called actinomyces. Natural products are substances made by living organisms to give them a fitness advantage. His research into that microbe group has advanced the discovery of new chemistry techniques and tools that make it possible to assemble complex natural products in a lab setting, a necessary step for their study and production. These methods are now employed by scientists to create medicines and other useful products.
In 2019, Shen won a competitive grant to move a pharmaceutical company’s massive microbe collection to an academic setting, thus creating the Natural Products Discovery Center collection. Shen proposed that modern genomic sequencing techniques be used to mine the collection for gene clusters that encoded natural products. He argued that a database should be built to open these new-to-science compounds to the entire scientific community.
Since then, Shen and his team have found that each microbial strain may conceal as many as 30 new chemical entities. They discovered thousands of natural compounds, many with antibiotic and anticancer potential.
Shen’s lab today is a bustling hive of discovery and invention. Since he first earned his doctorate from Oregon State University 35 years ago, he has co-authored 310 scientific papers that have been cited over 26,000 times. His discoveries and inventions have produced 15 patents, including anticancer drug candidates.
Shen has also trained 80 postdoctoral researchers, mentored 15 doctoral students and provided internship opportunities to dozens of undergraduate and high school students. And, the natural products genome database that he envisioned has blossomed, reaching over 800 researchers from 43 countries.
Wertheim UF Scripps chemistry department Chair Matthew D. Disney said Shen “has demonstrated a remarkable instinct in choosing the most exciting natural products for biosynthetic studies and a remarkable ability to discover novel chemistry or unveil novel mechanisms of enzyme catalysis from the biosynthetic machinery.”