Scripps Research Institute Scientists Demonstrate Long-Sought Drug Candidate Can Halt Tumor Grow

Scripps Research Institute Scientists Demonstrate Long-Sought Drug Candidate Can Halt Tumor Growth LA JOLLA, CA August 11, 2014 It's a trick any cat burglar knows: to open a locked door, slide a credit card past the latch.

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) tried a similar strategy when they attempted to disrupt the function of MYC, a cancer regulator thought to be undruggable. The researchers found that a credit card-like molecule they developed somehow moves in and disrupts the critical interactions between MYC and its binding partner.

The research, published the week of August 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also shows the drug candidate can stop tumor growth in animal models.

We finally hit a home run with this maybe a grand slam, said Kim Janda, co-author of the new study and Ely R. Callaway, Jr. Professor of Chemistry, director of the Worm Institute for Research and Medicine, and Skaggs Scholar and member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at TSRI.

MYC is a transcriptional factor, meaning it controls gene expression. When MYC is overexpressed or amplified, the unregulated expression of genes involved in cell proliferation, a key step in cancer growth, follows. MYC is involved in a majority of cancers, including Burkitt's lymphoma, a fast-growing cancer that tends to strike children.

For years, MYC had challenged researchers who sought to disrupt its activity in cancer cells. Researchers often design drugs by determining the structure of a disease-related molecule then finding weak points to attack to interfere with the molecule's function.

But MYC is different. At room temperature or body temperature, MYC without any binding partners is random and constantly shifting, said Jonathan Ross Hart, co-author of the study and a staff scientist in the Vogt laboratory at TSRI. It's like a piece of spaghetti.

So instead of specially designing a compound to target the structure of MYC, the researchers tested a range of compounds from a library developed by Janda, which he terms credit cards, to see if any could disrupt the interactions between MYC and other proteins important in cell proliferation.

One did a small molecule called KJ-Pyr-9.

To further investigate, the researchers ran additional tests using cell lines and rodent models. The team found that cells that depend on MYC die if treated with KJ-Pyr-9 in fact, a dose of KJ-Pyr-9 made it seem as if MYC was not there at all. In addition, when mice with MYC-dependent tumors received KJ-Pyr-9, the tumors showed no growth after 31 days, compared with significant tumor growth in untreated mice.

Janda hopes further research will reveal exactly how KJ-Pyr-9 interacts with MYC and how the compound can more effectively reach tumor cells.

In addition to Janda and Hart, other authors of the study, An Inhibitor of MYC Identified in a Kr hnke Pyridine Library, included Amanda L. Garner, Jing Yu, Yoshihiro Ito, Minghao Sun, Lynn Ueno, Jin-Kyu Rhee, Michael M. Baksh and Peter K. Vogt of TSRI; and Eduard Stefan, Markus Hartl and Klaus Bister of the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Funding for the research was provided by Pfizer Inc. (SPF-1892), the National Cancer Institute (R01-CA078230), The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology and the Austrian Science Fund (P23652, P22608).

About The Scripps Research Institute

The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) is one of the worlds largest independent, not-for-profit organizations focusing on research in the biomedical sciences. TSRI is internationally recognized for its contributions to science and health, including its role in laying the foundation for new treatments for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia, and other diseases. An institution that evolved from the Scripps Metabolic Clinic founded by philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps in 1924, the institute now employs about 3,000 people on its campuses in La Jolla, CA, and Jupiter, FL, where its renowned scientists including three Nobel laureates work toward their next discoveries. The institutes graduate program, which awards PhD degrees in biology and chemistry, ranks among the top ten of its kind in the nation. For more information, see www.scripps.edu.

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