Chemokine Receptors as Novel Targets for Cancer Therapy

Project Description Narrative:

New treatments for cancer, especially metastatic cancer, are desperately needed to decrease morbidity and mortality due to cancer. Current approved therapies can improve survival in cancer, but often the new treatments are only partially effective or have considerable side effects that diminish quality of life. The development of cancer therapies that have better side effect profiles, but which may diminish the risk of metastasis or improve the efficacy of known cancer treatments would be a potentially large step forward in making cancer treatment more effective without necessarily decreasing patient quality of life.

This project seeks to develop novel, potent CXCR4 antagonists in order to test the hypothesis that inhibition of CXCR4 (and other chemokine receptors) can either be effective by themselves for cancer therapy or synergize with known cancer therapies to improve existing treatment modalities without resulting in more side effects.

Additional studies to determine the physiological functions of these receptors in vivo will be performed in order to understand the potential side effects of chemokine receptor blockade.