BIT 495/595: Cancer Drug Development and Discovery
Course Overview:
Introduction to cancer biology, pre-clinical models in cancer research and specific drug target groups.
Students work collaboratively to perform high-throughput (HT) drug and content screens in human cancer cells to identify and validate compounds that serves as substrates for an enzyme over-expressed in solid tumors.
Topics:
Etiology of cancer
Signaling pathways involved in cancer progression
Cancer therapeutics
The drug development process
Pre-clinical cancer models and clinical trials
Future of precision medicine
Labs:
Tissue culture sterile technique (Week 1)
High-throughput drug screenings to detect active drug-like compounds against human breast cancer (Weeks 1-3)
In silico structure-activity relationship modeling of drug hits (Week 4)
Secondary validation of putative hit compounds using students’-choice of HT content screenings (Weeks 5-7)