Investigators: Raelene Endersby, Nick Gottardo, Tracy Seymour, Mani Kuchibhotla
Project description
Glioblastoma is the most common and most fatal type of primary brain tumour in humans. Current clinical therapy includes surgical resection, followed by radiotherapy and adjuvant chemotherapy. However, this contemporary treatment is not curative and patient mortality remains high. Typically the disease will progress within 6.9 months with standard therapy, and survival is 14.6 months from diagnosis. Our team aims to improve survival rates by finding and developing more effective treatments for this disease.
We have discovered a class of drug that targets the DNA damage response in cells that showed superior efficacy to current standard chemotherapy in killing glioblastoma cells. This study utilises patient-derived glioblastoma cells and established cell lines to investigate the efficacy of these drugs in vitro. To date, we have found that inhibitors of the kinases CHK1/2, Wee1 and ATR caused a dose-dependant reduction in glioblastoma cell proliferation, suggesting that these novel anti-cancer drugs have promising potential as new therapeutics for glioblastoma. In vivo studies are currently being conducted to examine the survival benefit of these kinases inhibitors in combination with chemotherapy, as well as radiation therapy. These data are essential to inform future clinical trials for patients with glioblastoma.
Collaborators
- Terrance Johns
- Anna Nowak
- Bryan Day
Partners
- Cure Brain Cancer Foundation
- Pirate Ship Foundation