Mutual Funds Against Cancer

“The Center for Applied Cancer Science represents a new academic construct that, in addition to deciphering cancer’s complexity and discovering new therapeutic leads, has an unprecedented opportunity to change the practice of how drugs are discovered and developed.”

Dr. Ron DePinho
Director, The Center for Applied Cancer Science

CACS is creating a drug discovery and development pipeline for the six deadliest cancers: colon, pancreatic, lung, melanoma (skin), myeloma (blood), and glioblastoma (brain). These cancers take a terrible toll on those they afflict, and have essentially been deemed incurable with today’s methods and medicine. The pipeline is a priority in the Institute’s strategic plan for research, the overarching goal of which is to accelerate the development of promising investigational new drugs (INDs) for each of these six diseases. Specifically, CACS scientists are identifying the genes that are integral to both malignancy and its reversal in each cancer, creating antibodies that will interact with and inhibit these targets, and testing each target/antibody interaction on sophisticated preclinical cancer models. Once drug candidates are identified, CACS collaborates with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to ensure that promising new drugs are moved into organized and focused clinical trials and then marketed successfully. CACS Mission: To Accelerate the Translation of Scientific Discoveries into New Drugs.

Through its drug discovery pipeline, CACS is designed to convert the raw material of basic discovery into drug development endpoints rapidly and systematically, and bring new treatments to cancer patients faster than ever before.

This will occur through five major activities:

Target discovery and validation
CACS scientists sequence tumor samples from the six major cancers, develop genomic profiles for each of these cancer types, and identify the specific genes that cause malignancy in each cancer.

Bioinformatics and computational science
CACS research relies upon new and powerful technologies that bring together biology, information science, and statistics in order to process the huge amounts of data that result from DNA microarray experiments and genomic profiling.

Drug development
Once genetic data is processed and genuine “targets” for therapy have been identified, CACS scientists create therapeutic antibodies that interact with these targets and reverse malignancy.

Preclinical models and experimental therapeutics
CACS scientists have created refined cancer models that mimic disease progression, enable elucidation of the role of particular genes in malignancy, and provide for rigorous assessment of the effectiveness and toxicity of anticancer drug agents.

Collaboration with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies
Once basic discoveries have been converted into promising drug candidates and tested on preclinical models, a CACS business development team collaborates with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to ensure that promising new drugs are moved into organized and focused clinical trials and then marketed successfully.