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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.
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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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