Today, about 25% of drugs approved to treat cancer are derived from nature – from the bark of a tree to marine life to bacteria in the soil. However, great potential remains in the discovery of natural products with properties that can prevent cancer or treat it early before it spreads. A University of Oklahoma researcher recently earned a National Institutes of Health grant to evaluate thousands of natural products with therapeutic potential.
The grant was awarded to Chinthalapally V. Rao, Ph.D.
, an OU College of Medicine professor and director of the Center for Cancer Prevention and Drug Development at OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center. Rao brings more than 30 years of experience in studying and refining natural products for drug development. He will coordinate with the National Cancer Institute's National Center for Translational Sciences, which has a repository of approximately 500,000 diverse natural product samples.
A principal objective of the grant is to better understand which specific components of a natural product have anticancer properties and the process by which they produce that effect. Those aims represent a knowledge gap that must be filled in order to increase the use of natural products in drug development. Currently, we don't have sufficient understanding about how natural products target cancer pathways (how cancer develops and persists).
With this grant, we aim to discover the precise target of natural products, and that precise target must be releva.