Cancer Therapeutics

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The three goals of the Cancer Therapeutic Program are: 1) to enhance and facilitate programmatic and interprogrammatic interaction and collaboration between basic scientists and clinical investigators in cancer therapeutics; 2) to promote the discovery, development, and application of novel therapeutic approaches; and 3) to develop translational and laboratory-based clinical investigations of new therapeutic agents and new therapeutic approaches. These goals are achieved through three Research Themes. Theme 1 is focused on technology development for target identification and drug discovery, with the goal of applying these new technologies (such as combinatorial chemistry, medicinal chemistry, computational biology, structural biology, nanotechnology, and high-throughput assays) to specific drug development projects in theme 2. For example, in theme 2, we are developing: cancer cell surface targeting ligands, novel targeting nanocarriers for cancer drug delivery and imaging, tyrosine kinase inhibitors, and nanoparticles for cancer vaccine and immunotherapy. In Theme 3, we use a collaborative group of molecular biologists, translational scientists, pharmacologists, and clinical investigators to facilitate the design and conduct of laboratory-driven clinical investigations. In view of the preclinical expertise in drug discovery and drug development available within the Program, there is great potential to translate promising new therapeutic leads into clinical trials and associated laboratory correlative studies. One example of such translation is the development of novel nanoformulations of paclitaxel soon to be tested in human. Furthermore, the expertise represented within this group of investigators provides a conduit for acquisition of new therapeutic agents from the NCI or industry. Providing a platform for clinical trials are specific project areas in clinical investigation and translational studies, including drug development awards (N01, U01, U10) and investigator-initiated trials. The program has 46 members from 13 different departments at UC Davis and 1 department at LLNL. It has 25 NCl-funded projects for $3.9 million ADC (total peer-reviewed funding, $8.8 million ADC). Of the 728 publications for the last funding period, 44% are inter-programmatic and 29% are intra-programmatic.