[BK21 Plus Seminar]
       
         
      ▶Subject: Systematic approaches to identify novel anti-cancer drug targets and cancer therapeutics
             
      
      ▶Speaker: Jouhyun Clare Jeon, Ph.D. (Terrence Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto)

                                
      
      ▶Date: 3:00PM/Jan/9(Fri)/2015
              
        
      ▶Place: Life Science Bldg. #104

             
      
             *Abctract
           Treatment options for a variety of deadly cancers remain limited, and the productivity of existing drug development pipelines, despite years of biomedical research, has been steadily declining. The recent dearth in effective drug targets for cancer therapy underlines the need for new methods to identify cancer drug targets and design targeted therapeutics. Here, we present an integrated approach that predicts novel anti-cancer drug targets and high-throughput approaches to identify potential therapeutics for cancer treatment. To identify novel anti-cancer drug targets, we built a classifier that integrates a variety of genomic and systematic datasets to prioritize drug targets specific for breast, pancreatic and ovarian cancer. We then devised strategies to inhibit these anti-cancer drug targets and selected a set of targets that are amenable to inhibition by small molecules, antibodies and synthetic peptides. We validated predicted drug targets and the effect of their inhibitors by showing strong anti-proliferative effects of both synthetic peptide inhibitors and small molecule inhibitors against our predicted targets. Some of the small molecule inhibitors are approved drugs (with non-cancer related indications), which could be potentially repositioned as new cancer therapies, and some of drugs show synergistic effects when they are used with other drugs. For peptide inhibitors, we designed a library of 50,000 human peptide binding motifs and used a pooled lentiviral system to intracellularly screen for their effects on cell proliferation. Through next-generation sequencing technique, we provide a list of peptide inhibitors that are promising anti-cancer drug leads for further development.

      ▶Inquiry: Prof. Sanguk Kim(279-2348)
             
       
       * This seminar will be given in English