{"id":216446,"date":"2025-06-23T09:12:27","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T14:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/engineers-turn-toxic-ancient-tomb-fungus-into-anti-cancer-drug"},"modified":"2025-06-23T09:12:27","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T14:12:27","slug":"engineers-turn-toxic-ancient-tomb-fungus-into-anti-cancer-drug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/engineers-turn-toxic-ancient-tomb-fungus-into-anti-cancer-drug","title":{"rendered":"Engineers turn toxic ancient tomb fungus into anti-cancer drug"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/engineers-turn-toxic-ancient-tomb-fungus-into-anti-cancer-drug2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Penn-led researchers have turned a deadly fungus into a potent cancer-fighting compound. After isolating a new class of molecules from <i>Aspergillus flavus<\/i>, a toxic crop fungus linked to deaths in the excavations of ancient tombs, the researchers modified the chemicals and tested them against leukemia cells. The result? A promising cancer-killing compound that rivals FDA-approved drugs and opens up new frontiers in the discovery of more fungal medicines.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFungi gave us penicillin,\u201d says Sherry Gao, Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) and in Bioengineering (BE) and senior author of a new paper in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41589-025-01946-9\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Nature Chemical Biology<\/i><\/a> on the findings. \u201cThese results show that many more medicines derived from natural products remain to be found.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Penn-led researchers have turned a deadly fungus into a potent cancer-fighting compound. After isolating a new class of molecules from Aspergillus flavus, a toxic crop fungus linked to deaths in the excavations of ancient tombs, the researchers modified the chemicals and tested them against leukemia cells. The result? A promising cancer-killing compound that rivals FDA-approved [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}