I’m a medicinal chemist so what we do is in the drug discovery and drug delivery field. In this particular project what we are working on are to regulate a protein, it’s called p53. p53 is generally regarded as a guardian protein that regulates genomic functions and then induces apoptosis in cancer cells. So in this particular talk we were focussed on regulating its concentration by inhibiting another protein that’s responsible for p53’s degradation, it’s called MDM2 which is ubiquitin ligase that puts ubiquitin on p53 and then sends it to the degradation pathway through the proteasome.

In this particular case we specifically focussed on acute lymphocytic leukaemia. Acute lymphocytic leukaemia tends to overexpress MDM2 that leads to p53 degradation and that allows cancer cells to survive. So we figured if we can figure out a way to reduce or lead to degradation MDM2 then we would be able to upregulate p53 and then therefore you induce apoptosis or cancer cell death. Then we synthesised a class of compound and that’s based on computational chemistry work, molecular modelling work and then we found compounds that were able to essentially lead to a cure in mouse models of acute lymphocytic leukaemia. We administered the compound at a fairly low dose that led to complete suppression of acute lymphocytic leukaemia. We tested it for about 150 days and then we saw complete survival during the 150 days, no relapse within about a year.

So, from what we know, that this is one of the rare classes of compound that would allow you to see a complete remission for this long period of time because acute lymphocytic leukaemia is very hard to cure. So we’re very excited about the discovery.

What stage is this in and when will it be rolled out into clinical practice?

This is still in the preclinical stage and then we have finished animal model studies. We are looking to raise funds to go into IND enabling work and then go into clinical trials.