I-Corps: Combination targeted drug design for personalized cancer therapy

Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX

Investigators

Abstract

An estimated 1.6 million people in the U.S. developed some form of cancer last year and this number is predicted to increase in coming years. Standard treatment approaches for some forms of cancer (such as breast or prostrate) provide high chances of survival, whereas for other types of cancer such as pancreas or brain cancer, survivals rates are significantly lower. One significant issue with the current approaches is that a cancer patient is treated based on their cohort and not based on their personalized genetic makeup. This often leads to ineffective treatments and poor outcomes for patients at all levels of risk. The proposed technology is an optimized algorithm and software to discover potential multi-target protein combinations that can produce highly effective combination drug treatments. The proposed approach is novel in integrating drug screen and genomic characterization data for predicting effective drug combinations. The proposed process can produce truly personalized therapeutic options with a small set of input data. Specifically, the team is looking at multi-target protein combinations that can produce highly effective combination drug treatments, with a current focus on protein kinases. Protein kinases been shown to be effective in multiple types of cancer, and have led to a treatment for CML, a type of leukemia. The framework allows the team to refine and focus predictions as more data becomes available through parallel tests that can be performed, such as exome sequencing, RNA sequencing and siRNA knockdown experiments. Most existing personalized approaches are primarily focused on applying drugs to target specific mutations based on what happens in other similar models. This team's approach intends to improve on this by specifically looking for multi-target combinations and multi-drug therapeutics to overcome many of the obstacles faced in the expansion of targeted therapies to new cancer types.