Outline of the research

From Natural Products to Drug Discovery
The major research focus of our division is to discover natural anticancer agents by targeting cancer cells’ characteristic performance (e.g. tolerance to nutrient starvation) in the tumor microenvironment. Tumor cells in general proliferate very fast in an unregulated manner and are often exposed to nutrition and oxygen deficient environment due to poor and disorganized vasculature. In particular, cells of the clinically hypo-vascular tumors such as pancreatic cancers have inherent ability to tolerate the extreme environments of low nutrition and oxygen by modulating their energy metabolism (austerity). Therefore, to discover natural anticancer agents that retard this tolerance to nutrition starvation is one of the major research goals of our lab. In order to achieve this goal, we are actively engaging in the following research projects.
1. Anti-austerity strategy-based screening of traditional medicinal plants from different origins (e.g. Kampo medicines, Ayurvedic medicinal plants, etc.) utilizing human pancreatic cancer cell lines (e.g. PANC-1, MIA Paca2, KLM-1, NOR-P1, Capan-1, PSN-1, etc).
2. Discovery of anti-austerity agents from natural medicine resources through bioassay-guided isolation, identification by using state-of-the-art chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques (e.g. NMR, MS, UV, IR, CD). Successful candidates will be evaluated for their in vivo anti-tumor activity by using the pancreatic cancer mouse model.
3. Investigation of the structure-activity relationship of the active natural compounds and their mechanism of action against cell survival pathways (PI3/AKT/mTOR/Autophagy).
4. Study of the effect of anti-austerity agents against metabolism of cancer cells utilizing FT-NMR and FT-MS approach.