Dr. Muhammet Karaman spoke to TRT Çukurova radio about the drug they will develop for cancer treatment.
Targetting Nucleotide Excision Repair for Cancer Treatments
Along with the target of the pathways causing cancer and hampering cancer treatment, we design and synthesize the chemical compounds in our lab. In order to improve cisplatin treatment, we have concentrated on the discovery of novel drugs that inhibit nucleotide excision repair proteins through virtual screening and molecular dynamic simulations methods and investigate the efficiency of the designed and synthesized compounds using in vivo and in vitro experiments.
Sancar, A. (2016). Mechanisms of DNA Repair by Photolyase and Excision Nuclease (Nobel Lecture). Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 55(30), 8502–8527.
Nucleotide Excision Repair Mechanism
Nucleotide excision repair is a mechanism that repair UV and cisplatin-induced DNA damage. In 2016, we have discovered the plant nucleotide excision repair mechanism in Sancar Lab. Our research group also focuses on the discovery of UV-induced DNA damage's repair mechanism in eukaryotic organisms, aiming to reveal the relationship between the repair mechanism and different pathways.
Targetting Pentose Phosphate Pathway for Cancer Treatments
The pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) is an important target for cancer treatment due to it plays a key role in biosynthesis and DNA synthesis which is the main target for chemotherapeutic drugs such as cisplatin and anthracycline. Inhibition of activity of glucose-6 phosphate dehydrogenase which is the first and checkpoint enzyme for the pathway cause slow down or destroys the growth of cancer cells. We are designing potential G6PD inhibitors for the blocking of PPP.
