The Natural Products Branch (NPB)

The Natural Products Branch (NPB) administers and curates a collection of plant, marine and microbial material from around the world, transforming raw material into research amenable samples. The NPB facilitates the distribution of samples to academic, government and industrial collaborators.

The principal goal of the NPB is to accelerate drug discovery through its network of collaborators, by utilizing a diverse natural product library and providing analytical support for isolation, screening and structure elucidation. In addition, the NPB manages the procurement of sufficient quantities of raw material to produce adequate yields of those active agents selected for preclinical and clinical evaluation.

The NPB works in tandem with the Natural Products Support Group and the Natural Products Repository, both of which are located at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR) in Frederick, MD. Access to the Repository is subject to certain conditions and the execution of a Material Transfer Agreement.

Available Libraries

Credit: Design by Christopher C. Thornburg

The NCI Program for Natural Product Discovery (NPNPD) Prefractionated Library

The NPNPD is a library of partially-purified natural product fractions that are more amenable for use in high-throughput screening. It is publicly accessible, free of charge, and open to screening against all disease targets.

Natural products are an important source of new drugs and drug leads. The library was launched with a goal to reinvigorate natural product-based drug discovery research in 2019. It has over 500,000 natural product fractions available to date.

The NCI Natural Products Open Repository Program

Each organism in the collection is extracted in the Natural Products Extraction Laboratory both for organic and aqueous soluble constituents. The resulting extracts are stored at -20°C in the Natural Products Repository. Both these facilities are operated by Leidos Biomedical Research Inc. at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research under contract to the NCI.

Natural Products Set V

The Natural Products Set V consists of 390 compounds that were selected from the DTP Open Repository collection of 140,000 compounds. Factors in selection were origin, purity (>90% by ELSD, major peak has correct mass ion), structural diversity, and availability of compound. This set was created in response to numerous drug discovery research groups that expressed a desired to study a variety of scaffold structures having multiple functional groups.

Collaborate with the NPB

Request a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA):
- Single Principle Investigator email, download
- Research Group email, download
- Bulk extract request
Requests for a library or extract will be accepted from research organizations and individual investigators in the form of a brief proposal (up to 5 pages) formatted as follows:
- Introduction
- Research Hypothesis
- Screening Process, together with description of the characteristics of the screen
- Personnel
- Organizational Research Capabilities
Requests will normally be reviewed by staff of the NCI Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis (DCTD). The review will consider the scientific merit of the proposal and the chemical and pharmaceutical expertise for adequate follow-up studies.
Interested in working directly with NPB staff? Request a more extensive Collaborative Research Agreement