February 25, 2021 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Free- This event has passed.
Center for Experimental Therapeutics Seminar Series
The Center for Experimental Therapeutics unites cutting-edge technologies with a multidisciplinary group of preclinical and clinical investigators to further drug discovery and development. Monthly seminars aim to encourage collaboration, advance innovation efforts and translate scientific discoveries into effective therapies for human diseases.
Presented by Brian Druker, M.D.
Director, Knight Cancer Institute
Imatinib (Gleevec) exemplifies the successful development of a rationally designed, molecularly targeted therapy for the treatment of a specific cancer. Imatinib is an inhibitor of the ABL, platelet-derived growth factor receptor, and KIT tyrosine kinases. Given the pathogenetic role of the BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), this was the first disease selected for clinical trials with imatinib.
The development of imatinib for CML will be briefly reviewed, from the identification of the BCR-ABL as the causative molecular event in CML to the clinical trials of imatinib. In patients with CML who acquire resistance to imatinib, mutations in the kinase domain of ABL are the most common mechanism of resistance and the development of second generation drugs targeting these mutations will also be reviewed.
Imatinib has now been successfully used in other malignancies driven by each of the targets of imatinib and the extension of imatinib to other diseases will be described. Lastly, the application of the paradigm of targeting molecular pathogenetic events in other cancers will be explored along with the ability to accelerate target identification and validating through data integration.
This event is hosted by Sanjay Malhotra, Ph.D., and Shivaani Kummar, M.D.