SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is designed to discover compounds from a unique Natural Products Library that block the altered patterns of gene expression seen in pancreatic cancer. The extract and fraction library to be screened is from Dr. Gunatilaka at the University of Arizona and are derived from Sonoran desert plants and their associated microorganisms. These organisms have a high capacity to produce a variety of secondary metabolites, often in large quantities, which are essential for their survival as they are constantly exposed to a harsh, hot and dry environment. Thus, these extracts may contain a wealth of pharmacologically important small molecules. The first goal will be to identify extracts that block pancreatic-cancer-specific gene expression and then test whether they are also capable of inhibiting growth/proliferation of pancreatic cancer cells. The long term goal is to develop a targeted therapeutic for pancreatic cancer. The broader/commercial impacts of this research are novel non-toxic drugs that can treat pancreatic cancer for which no effective therapy exists. Pancreatic cancer ranks fourth among the leading causes of cancer deaths in the United States with an estimated death toll of 35,240 for 2009, roughly equal to the number of new patients for the same year. An effective therapeutic would reduce direct medical costs for treatment, estimated to be $881 million annually in the US, including hospitalization costs, outpatient costs, and home and long-term care. In addition it would hold the hope of returning patients to a productive life

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to address the high lethality of pancreatic cancer. Screening has begun with Phase IB funding, of natural products from the Sonoran Desert that have produced other promising drug candidates, testing effects on human pancreatic cancer cells. The objective of Phase II is to develop a drug candidate that alters expression of selected pancreatic cancer-related genes and that kills pancreatic cancer cells that express those genes. The drug candidates will be developed using a personalized medicine approach. The gene expression profiles (or genomics patterns) for many different pancreatic cancer tumors will be matched to the effects on genomics produced by the drug. This personalized approach could translate directly to clinical trials to pre-select patients most likely to respond to the drug. The broader impacts of this research are first to reduce deaths due to pancreatic cancer, which ranked fourth among the leading causes of cancer death with 35,240 deaths in the US in 2009. The 5-year survival rate for patients with metastatic disease is 1.8%. The societal impact and commercial value of targeting such a lethal disease are very high. Further, the personalized medicine approach to drug development will impact many oncology projects. The idea of matching each patient's genomics patterns with each drug that targets that pattern will be critical. Each kind of cancer is not one disease, but a wide spectrum of accumulated genomics changes that have to be addressed individually.