Chemistry professor Paul J. Hergenrother has been selected an American Chemical Society Fellow for 2025 in recognition of his exceptional contributions to science. The group of 36 ACS Fellows was announced July 28, 2025.
The ACS Fellows Program was created by the ACS Board of Directors in December 2008 to recognize members for outstanding achievements in and contributions to science, the profession, and the Society.
Hergenrother, Kenneth L. Rinehart Jr. Endowed Chair in Natural Products Chemistry, and Professor of Chemistry, has been a faculty member at Illinois since 2001 pursuing research in the areas of synthetic organic chemistry, chemical biology, and biochemistry. He is also Deputy Director of the Cancer Center at Illinois, Director of the NIH Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Program, and a professor at Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, the Micro and Nanotechnology Lab, and Carle Illinois College of Medicine. He is also affiliated with the Department of Biochemistry.
The goal of research in the Hergenrother lab is to use organic compounds to identify novel cellular targets that can be exploited in the treatment of diseases including cancer and drug-resistant bacteria.
Recently, Flightpath Biosciences, Inc., a clinical stage biotechnology company focused on the development of precision therapeutics targeting bacterial pathogens, licensed a class of antibiotics developed in the Hergenrother lab. The original antibiotic agent, lolamicin, effectively treated bacterial infections in animal models of disease — without wiping out beneficial microbes in the gut. This class of drugs is notable for sparing healthy microbes but also for targeting pathogenic gram-negative bacteria, the most difficult bacterial infections to treat.
In 2023, Hergenrother was named a National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator. Hergenrother is the first University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher to receive the prestigious award that recognizes the outstanding performance of cancer researchers, providing investigators with significant financial support to undergird current or future research programs of “unusual potential in cancer.”
Hergenrother’s primary cancer research focus is the identification of new anticancer compounds with unusual modes-of-action and his lab has discovered multiple new anticancer compounds, including PAC-1, which has advanced through a close collaboration with CCIL researcher Prof. Tim Fan and completed a Phase 1 clinical trial in late-stage cancer patients. In collaboration with the laboratory of CCIL researcher Prof. David Shapiro, Hergenrother’s lab discovered the compound ErSO, licensed for clinical development by Bayer AG in 2021, and the compound TEQ103 has been licensed by Oncoteq. In addition, the compound IB-DNQ was discovered in the Hergenrother lab and is advancing toward clinical trials.