Featuring:
Dr. Ruth Keri (Dept. of Pharmacology, CWRU)
Date: November 9, 2009
Time: Drinks start at 6:30 PM,
discussion starts around 7:00 PM
Location: Tasting Room, Great Lakes Brewing
Company (2701
Carroll
Ave, Cleveland)
Drugs are ubiquitous in our daily lives, yet most of us are unaware of
the vast canyon that must be traversed to bring the next Prozac from
the lab to your medicine cabinet. How does a drug candidate make its
way into that pill that you pop every morning? It is a long and
complex process and a huge business, but sadly one that yields
extremely low returns on the significant investment. This is the case
for most drug candidates, but especially jarring in the case of cancer
therapeutics. A recent New York Times article [Pollack A, 9/2/2009,
FORTY YEARS' WAR: For Profit, Industry Seeks Cancer Drugs] summarizes
the somber realities of cancer chemotherapy, reporting that out of the
860 cancer drugs currently in clinical trials, only 1 or 2 drugs will
make it to the market in the next year or two.
Why are new cancer drugs so difficult to develop? Why haven’t greater
strides been made in finding a cure despite staggering scientific
advancements? There is no simple answer, of course, but by examining
two complementary areas, target discovery and drug delivery, we can
begin to shed some light on this difficult question. The first step in
any therapy is finding a drug target. Of course without this discovery
component, there would be no therapy. Once a candidate target has been
identified and an active agent has been identified, the research shifts
to drug delivery -- a concept intimately intertwined with discovery.
While the targeting and activity of any agent are of great importance,
its packaging (and delivery route) is critical to achieving therapeutic
success. All therapeutics from the mundane ibuprofen or aspirin, to the
most sophisticated agents depend on some type of delivery system to get
them to their intended target site. If the drug cannot access every
single cell in every microscopic tumor scattered throughout the body,
the therapy will eventually fail.
Drug discovery and delivery research at Case Western has been
flourishing for a number of years. Target discovery has been greatly
facilitated by the advent of technologies that mine the complexities of
the human genome and identify differences that exist between tumors and
their normal tissue counterparts. Once targets are identified and their
contributions to a disease are validated in cell and animal models,
drugs can be developed that block or enhance the activity of such
targets. Drugs must be effectively delivered to their sites of
action.Most delivery systems under development act simply as a
protective mechanism that shelters the drug throughout its tortuous
journey in the body. Others reduce systemic toxicity of potent
chemotherapeutics by targeting them to a specific site and using
external forces to control their effects. All hope to improve the
outcomes of chemotherapy and reduce the extreme side effects that most
patients treated with chemotherapy face.
Join us as we take a closer look at approaches for discovering new drug
targets as well as drug delivery techniques for cancer therapy and
explore how researchers at CWRU are working to make those pesky pills,
painful shots and associated collateral damage a thing of the past.
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