Prabagaran Narayanasamy, PhD

Assistant Professor, Pulmonary, Critical Care & Sleep Medicine Division

Prabagaran Narayanasamy, PhD, is an assistant professor in the UNMC Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology.

He is an editorial board member for Microbiology Spectrum and Scientific Reports journal and academic editor for PLoS ONE journal. He also served on scientific evaluation panels for the National Institutes of Health and the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.

In his graduate work, Dr.Narayanasamy discovered a polymer-anchored chiral catalyst and used it for Michael addition reaction for nitrones and amines to make beta amino acids. During his post-doctoral work,  he developed a new methodology for the synthesis of a,b-disubstituted b-amino acids, by conjugate addition reaction, and he has US patented all methodology and all of the intermediates and final compounds. He also discovered that metal geometry is mainly responsible for variable asymmetric inductions in the catalytic reaction.

At Harvard University, he discovered a new sulfoxide ligand for high regioselectivity. He also worked at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and studied macrocyclization and successfully synthesized protein kinase C inhibitors and Hepatitis B inhibitors through a short route by forming macrolactams and macrolactones.

At Colorado State University, Fort Collins, he began to apply his chiral technology for designing and discovering new drugs against tuberculosis. Here he found a new drug lead which specifically inhibits menaquinone synthesis. He has synthesized many intermediates of MEP pathway for the first time in an enantiomerically pure form. He has synthesized the enantiomerically pure MEP, CDPME, CDPME2P, MEcPP for the first time. This MEP pathway is used in discovery of broad-spectrum antibiotics including drug resistant strains.

In 2011, he joined UNMC and started working in HIV and nanomedicine. When he was working in HIV in 2012, he first characterized the biology of exosomes and took Cryo-EM picture of exosomes. In 2014, he joined UNMC's then-Department of Pathology and Microbiology as an assistant professor. He started working on HIV-TB coinfection and discovered the first single drug to treat HIV-TB co-infection. He has also made novel nanoparticles for sustained drug releasing technique for weeks to reduce drug dosage and toxicity. 

He has also targeted both iron and heme uptake pathway in iron metabolism by two different gallium complexes to eradicate ESKAPE pathogens. He discovered a novel non-traditional bicyclic alkyl amine as MenA inhibitor, targeting Gram-positive bacteria, including MRSA.

He recently started a drug discovery program towards reducing aging and Alzheimer's disease and found a potential drug candidate.