Targeting the proteasome mechanism

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Published: 7 Dec 2012
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Dr Stig Linder – Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Dr Stig Linder talks to ecancer at that the 2012 IDIBELL meeting in Barcelona about a new drug for multiple myeloma that targets the proteasome system.

 

This new agent aims to combat and identify new mechanisms by manipulating the waste disposal system of tumour cells, leading to cancer cell death.

I am working with cancer therapeutics, cancer drugs, and what I’m presenting here is a new drug that we have developed and we are developing for cancer therapy. The idea with the drug is that it targets the so-called proteasome system, that’s the waste disposal system of the cells for protein. So tumour cells are very active and they make a lot of defective proteins, protein garbage, they’re not really that good at making perfect proteins. There’s a waste system to take care of these defective proteins and if you block that waste system you get a lot of garbage accumulating in the tumour cells which kills the tumour cells. So there is a drug being used in the clinic for a disease called multiple myeloma which is quite effective but for that drug one gets developing resistance so the tumours respond for a while, the cells respond and the patients respond for a while, but then you get disease progression. So we have identified a new mechanism for developing drugs to target this waste disposal system and that is performed in another way than the traditional drug that is used today. So we are very hopeful, we have very good results with that and really hope that we can develop this new drug into the clinic. So basically I have shown data on how we identified this drug, on exactly what it does and how this new drug that we have is different from the drug that is used in the clinic. So the idea with the drug and with the project is that patients that are now treated with… the drug is called bortezomib, Velcade, in the clinic for multiple myeloma and develop resistance, they can then when they have done that one can use our drug to continue treatment and continue to control the disease.