Cancer Pharmacology and Informatics
Projects

Our research on drug discovery and development of cancer treatments combating cellular drug resistance may be divided into three main activities:
 

A. Drug and Multi-Compound Treatment Discovery
We work towards discovering novel drugs and multi-compound treatments to overcome problems associated with cellular drug resistance in cancer therapy. To reach this goal we use in-house compound libraries, information-rich model systems, high-throughput technologies for drug screening and gene expression combined with high-level data analysis. Utilization of gene expression signatures retrieved after drug induced perturbation of cell systems as a tool for new treatment discovery is a new line of research currently addressed.
 

B. Pharmacological Profiling and Optimization
It is important to gain an improved pharmacological understanding about the properties of the new treatment, i.e. what system level effects it causes and if it meets basic requirements to be advanced to further preclinical and clinical testing. The tools range from determinations and predictions of mechanism of action, diagnosis-specific activity ex vivo, toxicity, combination activity and proof of concept studies in vivo.
 

C. Personalized Medicine and Clinical Translation
Two key challenges for improved medical treatment are to find the best possible treatment for each patient and to translate the findings into clinical practice. To meet these challenges, we aim at combining large-scale gene expression measurements with computational algorithms to predict the most promising treatment protocol for each patient. At the final step of clinical translation, we perform academic clinical trials for the most promising treatment protocols.