Liron Bar-Peled, PhD

The goal of this project is to make new drugs against ovarian cancer genes using a new drug discovery method.  Ovarian cancer (OC) remains a deadly disease. OC will be diagnosed in over 21,000 women in the United States this year and 13,770 patients are expected to pass away during this time.  While initial responses to the best anti-cancer drugs are frequent, most patients with OC will experience disease again after 24 months of treatment, and most women will unfortunately pass away from this disease within five years. Thus, there is an urgent need to make new drugs to treat ovarian cancer. The classic approach to drug discovery is both time intense and costly, and most cancer drug discovery is focused on making drugs against cancer proteins whose shape is considered readily ‘druggable’. Our central premise is that many ovarian cancer proteins can be drugged. To test our idea, we will use a new tool that finds druggable proteins by detecting drug binding to cancer causing proteins in OC cell lines and patient tumors. If successful, this program should develop a new class of anti-cancer drugs to help women suffering from OC.