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)

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