| Project title | Novel Targeted Chemotherapeutic Agents Against Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Gliomas |
|---|---|
Grant Amount | $164,500 |
Institution | Children’s Cancer Institute |
Investigator Team | Principal investigators A/Prof. David Ziegler and Dr. Maria Tsoli |
Grant Type | 2014 Innovation Grant |
Years | 2014 – 2017 |
A/Prof. Ziegler and Dr. Tsoli plan to test the efficacy of Sunitinib as well other drugs that were identified through previous research, on DIPGs and healthy cells. Since DIPG is one of the most treatment resistant tumours ever encountered, it is considered very likely that single or double agent chemotherapy in combination with radiotherapy will offer the greatest chance of improved patient outcomes. Therefore, this project will test the combination of Sunitinib with the 10 drug/targets identified from gene expression analysis and assess the efficacy of killing the DIPG tumour cells. They will also evaluate the efficacy of the most promising combination therapies alone, and together with radiotherapy in two independent, in vivo models of DIPG.
“Utilising compounds that are known to be clinically available will mean that positive results will be able to be rapidly translated to the clinic for testing in the early phase clinical trial setting. Ultimately, this novel approach may lead to the rapid development of novel therapeutic combination strategies for a tumour that till now has proven devastating to patients and their families, with no known effective treatments.”
A/Prof. David Ziegler
Progress
The funding from Cure Brain Cancer Foundation has allowed us to investigate completely new therapeutic strategies based on robotic high throughput screening approaches for the most aggressive of all childhood cancers.
We have successfully identified four leading combination therapies and we hope to be able to continue evaluating pre- clinically in order to develop a strong rationale for the translation of these strategies to the clinic. Interestingly these identified combinations appear to act through different mechanisms of action such as RTK/PI3K inhibition, cell cycle arrest and calcium signaling.