The mission of Kancharla’s laboratory in the Department of Chemistry at Portland State University is to develop new, safe and affordable medicines for the prevention and treatment of various human diseases from natural and synthetic sources. In particular, our team is dedicated to discovering and developing new antimalarials that can combat multiple stages of the malaria parasite life cycle, with novel mechanisms of action to overcome the emerging drug resistance. Malaria is a disease caused by the single celled Plasmodium parasite that is carried by the female Anopheles mosquitoes and impacts over 200 million people each year. Approximately half a million people die from malaria each year, the majority of which are young children and pregnant women. Over the past ten years, our Portland State University team (including Dr. Papireddy Kancharla, Dr. Kevin Reynolds and Dr. Jane Kelly) has built a strong foundation on the pioneering discovery of natural product inspired novel antimalarial tambjamine and prodiginine chemotypes that are potent across the malaria parasite life cycle with potential to prevent relapsing liver stage infections and possible novel mechanisms of action. Extensive structural optimizations are currently underway toward the selection of promising tambjamine and/or prodiginine compounds to be advanced for future preclinical evaluations.