Pangea Bio CITO Prof. Andreas Bender received the 2024 Synergy Award of the Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research, which was awarded on 15 July 2024 at the International Congress on Natural Products Research in Krakow, Poland.

This award recognizes the work Andreas has done in the field of synergy research during his career, which aimed at understanding the effects of compound combinations in biological systems using -omics data and computational modelling, and which was also supported by an ERC Starting Grant in 2013, together with the University of Cambridge.

In his research, Andreas has explored the use of transcriptomics data to understand and anticipate synergy of natural products, such as fucoxanthin, with synthetic small molecules in glioblastoma, as well as with colleagues developed the first deep learning-based approach in the area, DeepSynergy, which is now cited more than 400 times.

Part of the synergy work that Andreas has performed was also related to understanding synergy in traditional medicines, such as on understanding the interactions of constituent compounds of Shexiang Baoxin Pill (SBP), a treatment from Traditional Chinese Medicine for angina pectoris. Here computational modelling, and network biology, has been used to model and predict synergy of compounds, and synergistic interactions between ginsenosides on angiogenesis (blood vessel formation) have been validated in experiment.

In addition his work has contributed articles to better understanding of characteristics and limitations of synergy measures which are widely used in the field.

We are very glad that the expertise Andreas developed during his career on the analysis and prediction of bioactivities of individual compounds, and compound combinations, is now being put into practice in drug discovery within Pangea Bio, and we congratulate Andreas on this award.

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Read more about the award here: https://ga-online.org/about-ga/awards/ga-synergy-award/