BHUBANESWAR: In a new discovery, researchers from Purdue University, US, in collaboration with the National Institute of Health (NIH) claimed to have developed a new tool through which they found a cancer drug, previously disapproved by traditional testing methods, could be effective in treating bladder cancer.
The team led by Odia scientist Aryamav Pattnaik and Chinese scientist Dr Lupin Wang used a new and innovative computational method - pathway ensemble tool (PET), which helped accurately identify the biological pathways that are disrupted in cancer and other complex diseases.
“PET is a robust tool that combines optimised versions of multiple techniques to yield highly accurate results, identifying which pathways are malfunctioning in cancer without bias. This allows us to discover effective drugs that standard methods often miss,”explained Pattnaik.
The research team used PET to analyse 12 different cancer types and identified key pathways associated with cancer progression, acting as potential biomarkers. During a focused study on bladder cancer, the researchers with the help of PET, stumbled upon the efficacy of a CDK9 inhibitor drug - CCT068127, which was found to significantly slow human tumour growth in preclinical models.
“This surprising result paved the way for a new clinical trial to test CDK9 inhibitors in dogs with bladder cancers that resemble human forms of the disease, in collaboration with Purdue university faculty Prof Deborah Knapp,” said Pattnaik.
They found that in two out of three independent cohorts of bladder cancer samples, the expression of CDK9 was higher in the basal subtypes compared to luminal subtypes. This suggested CDK9 inhibition might be more beneficial for the basal subtype of bladder cancer.
At present, the first line of treatment for bladder cancer consists of chemotherapy regimens that feature cisplatin. “As expected, cisplatin also significantly inhibited the growth of bladder cancer cell lines. Our approach also predicted that cisplatin desirably normalises prognostic genes. The research corroborates the notion that a PET-based approach can guide re-purposing drugs that prove effective in the treatment of cancer,” said the researcher.
A scientist at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Patnaik hails from Baideswar village in Banki block of Cuttack district. He has obtained his PhD on vaccine and drug development against viral diseases from the University of Nebraska, USA.
This breakthrough is set to redefine cancer treatment strategies and the potential of computational tools like PET in personalised medicine and drug discovery, he said.