From Big Pharma to a new frontier

By Madeline Swanson | Photos by Kaley Joy

The national animal of Panama, the Panamanian golden frog, is currently extinct in the wild. In Southeast Michigan and Ohio, the invasive emerald ash borer has wiped out nearly the entire population of ash trees. And right here in Ann Arbor, hemlock trees have recently been threatened by the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid insect. 

But what do these different threatened and endangered species have to do with the University of Michigan? 

At the College of Pharmacy, Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry Tim Cernak is using his background in chemistry and experience in the pharmaceutical industry to develop new medicines to help ailing plants and animals and combat extinction, and that can have an impact on life-changing medicine for humans. In fact, Cernak developed a treatment for an illness threatening the Gila monster, a species that has been instrumental in the development of diabetes drugs like Ozempic. It’s a brand new field he coined “conservation chemistry.”

“We’re all interconnected, right? So the mission is to prevent the extinction of one species because it’s required for all of our health,” Cernak said, emphasizing how the decline of frogs, bats, and other species can have profound ripple effects across human health and agriculture. “Frogs play a critical role in ecosystems, controlling insect populations, and serving as a food source for higher predators.”

At Michigan, his latest endeavor is as challenging as it is critical: saving the Panamanian golden frog, a species whose presence has been eradicated in the wild by a relentless fungal pandemic.

But what led a chemist to get involved in ecosystem preservation in the first place?

Charting new territory

Cernak’s journey into conservation began in the pharmaceutical industry. At Merck, he addressed diseases from cancer and Alzheimer’s to hypertension and diabetes, combining organic chemistry and data science to accelerate drug discovery. And, as co-founder of Iambic Therapeutics, Cernak employed AI and various robotic technologies to design and test molecules, and ultimately, make new medicines faster.

He soon realized he could apply the same cutting-edge chemistry and AI tools to save species, just as he would to fight human diseases. That’s where his research at Michigan began, specifically with endangered hemlock trees, including the hemlocks in U‑M’s own Nichols Arboretum.

“If you were looking at a map of America with the spread of this invasive insect, it was like looking at a human patient’s image where you could see where the disease starts and how it’s spreading—like a heat map,” Cernak explained. “My brain was just really conditioned to those types of health images, and now I’m looking at a map of America showing this same type of heat map as this bug is destroying the hemlocks. I thought, COVID was an invasive pathogen, and we applied medicine to that. So I began researching ways to develop a medicine to preserve the hemlock forest.”

Chemistry meets conservation

And he didn’t stop there. He then learned of the Panamanian golden frog, which was under threat of the “worst pandemic in the history of the planet,” Cernak said. 

“It’s the biggest disease event that has ever been documented on our planet. And so as a pharmacist, I want to study that,” he said.

The Panamanian golden frog, revered as Panama’s national emblem, symbolizes the ecological riches of its homeland. However, like hundreds of other amphibian species, it has been decimated by the chytrid fungus, a lethal pathogen that has induced the most severe recorded biodiversity loss attributable to any disease.

Cernak’s mission? He says it’s not only to fight this deadly fungus, but to restore the frog’s ecosystem and reintroduce them in the wild, noting, “our holy grail is to invent a medicine specifically for frogs.”

Accomplishing this requires the power of AI and robotics to accelerate drug discovery and development. 

At the core of Cernak’s conservation chemistry is a reliance on these technologies that he had expertly wielded during his time in corporate pharmaceuticals. Now in the academic sphere, he’s repurposing these tools to churn out potential antifungal treatments much faster than traditional methods allow: AI models train on extensive datasets, scanning for chemical compounds that could combat chytrid without harming amphibians or their habitats.

“We’re essentially doing high-speed chemistry for frogs,” Cernak explained. 

Forging a path forward

Achieving these ambitious goals requires significant resources. That’s where donors like Brad Feld through his Anchor Point Foundation as well as the research philanthropy Hypothesis Fund come in, whose generosity helps fuel Cernak’s groundbreaking research.

Feld is an avid supporter of animal health initiatives that interconnect with human health and was inspired to fund Cernak’s work at Michigan after reading about his efforts to heal a gila monster at The Creature Conservancy in Ann Arbor. Studying gila monster venom has been critical to the development of breakthrough medications like GLP-1 for diabetes and weight loss management, medications with which Feld has had personal success. He said it’s these kinds of unexpected discoveries that underpin the value of fundamental scientific research.

“I believe anything that we do in life is an endless series of experiments,” Feld said. “When I apply that same thinking to research, I think finding people like Tim who are doing fundamental scientific research that is high-risk and high-reward is really compelling.”

Similarly, Hypothesis Fund, founded by David Sanford, targets bold, cutting-edge discovery science. He describes Cernak’s work with the Panamanian golden frog as a hallmark of “high-uncertainty/high-reward” research that could significantly shift our understanding of conservation. Sanford admires that Cernak “is asking unanswered questions” about how these frogs produce their toxin—their own unique chemistry—noting that by knowing more about this could potentially reveal novel chemistries, as well as aid in conservation efforts.

“We’ve always needed science, but arguably never more than we do now, or will in the coming decades if we’re going to tackle scale challenges to the health of people and the planet,” Sanford said. 

Support from the Anchor Point Foundation and Hypothesis Fund goes beyond financial aid. Both non-alumni, Feld and Sanford provide Cernak’s team with the freedom to pursue creative and novel solutions to ecological crises, underscoring the importance of high-risk science in achieving tangible environmental impact. 

“The science we’re doing—it’s the highest level I’ve ever engaged in,” Cernak expressed. By studying species-specific treatments and exploring chemical solutions for public health and conservation, Cernak is charting new territory in conservation chemistry.

The big picture

Cernak’s long-term vision is to see conservation chemistry recognized as a field in its own right, integrating with and supporting established conservation biology efforts. His work is not only paving the way for more inclusive and collaborative ecological research, but also advocating for the broader understanding that the health of our planet’s ecosystems is intrinsically tied to our own.

“At its heart, conservation chemistry is about hope,” Cernak concludes. “Hope that with informed intervention, we can buffer the impacts of human activity on biodiversity and secure the resilience of ecosystems we depend on.”

If you’re interested in supporting this work, reach out to [email protected].