IU cancer center receives grant for pancreatic cancer research
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Two researchers at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center will have a five-year, $2.4 million grant at their disposal to study pancreatic cancer treatments.
The National Cancer Institute granted the funding to Dr. Mark Kelley and Dr. Melissa Fishel who are studying new therapies focusing on the pathways pancreatic cancer uses to survive.
They have made strides in similar research areas in their labs and have worked together for over 20 years. Their work has resulted in drugs and therapies used currently to treat patients.
Their research will identify characteristics of cells that respond to Ref-1 inhibition and evaluate how combination therapies overcome a cancer cell’s resistance. They will move the best therapies forward to clinical trials.
“Our earlier research advanced a first-generation Ref-1 inhibitor, the drug APX3330, to a Phase I clinical trial in adult cancer patients. That work allowed us to identify the next generation of Ref-1 inhibitors, along with a strategy for identifying patients with a sensitivity to Ref-1 inhibition and drugs likely to make our Ref-1 inhibitors work better,” Kelley said in a news release. “Now, with this grant, we propose to investigate Ref-1 alone and in combined therapies that we believe will better inhibit pancreatic cancer growth and metastasis by infringing on the critical pathways tumors use to survive.”
Kelley is the associate director of basic science at the cancer center and co-leader of the cancer center’s Cancer Drug Discovery and Development Accelerator. Fishel co-leads the cancer center’s Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis research program and a project in the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Stromal Reprogramming U01 Consortium.