May 25, 2005
Purdue dean granted $6.8 million to continue cancer research
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The National Institutes of Health has granted a team led by Purdue University more than $6.8 million over the next five years to expand its hunt for natural cancer preventatives derived from land- and ocean-dwelling organisms.
The NIH's National Cancer Institute has renewed a grant originally issued in 1991 to a team led by John M. Pezzuto, who is a professor of medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology, to explore the properties of naturally occurring substances that might prevent or delay the onset of cancer. The multidisciplinary group – which includes scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Purdue – already has had several years of success working with a range of such substances extracted from plants found around the world.
"Studies funded by the first grant began in 1991, and since that time our team has located many active natural substances that could be used to treat colon, skin and breast cancer," said Pezzuto, who also is dean of Purdue's College of Pharmacy, Nursing and Health Sciences. "We currently have nine patents and two drug development programs that derive specifically from the work we have done."
One of the most promising substances the group has found is Resveratrol, Pezzuto said. Following its discovery in a Peruvian plant, about 1,000 papers have been published on the chemical's potential as a treatment for viruses, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease, as well as cancer. He said it also might slow the aging process.
Another discovery, Deguelin (pronounced deg-WAY-lin), was found in a plant from Zimbabwe and is currently undergoing tests for use against lung cancer. It could inhibit skin and breast cancer as well.
Other Purdue investigators include faculty in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. Several separate projects, all of which concern the advancement of a kind of therapy known as chemoprevention, are to be funded by the grant.
"Chemoprevention aims to give people non-toxic substances that can be consumed orally and that will help stave off cancer," Pezzuto said. "Scientists have long known that plants and other organisms produce an incredible diversity of chemicals that have the potential to fight human disease. The problems lie in determining which of them work best and where to find them, and the search is a long and arduous process."
Once these materials have been obtained, the team prepares extracts and evaluates them with a panel of tests that indicate how well each material inhibits major stages of carcinogenesis. The tests have been explicitly designed for this purpose, Pezzuto said.
For this next chapter in their search, Pezzuto said the team intends to search an almost completely untapped source for these substances – microorganisms from the deep-sea floor.
"Land plants have often proven to be excellent sources of potential cancer inhibitors, but we are trying to look under other stones as well," he said. "In this case, the stones are at the bottom of the ocean, but the diversity of organisms that thrive in ocean sediments is now beginning to be appreciated, and we are looking forward to the chance to sift through what we find there."
Pezzuto's laboratory background is helping the group in its attempts to synthesize the substances they have found.
"I started out studying biochemistry and cancer, then I moved into a natural products lab," he said. "As I was doing this, the field of cancer prevention was emerging, so I wondered if we could put them together. With luck, the world will continue to give us natural cancer inhibitors, the properties of which we can further refine in the lab."
Writer: Chad Boutin, (765) 494-2081, cboutin@purdue.edu
Source: Elizabeth Ryan, School of Pharmacy research coordinator, (765) 494-1327, eryan@pharmacy.purdue.edu
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
Related Web site:
Purdue Web page on natural inhibitors of carcinogenesis
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