At the start of November, ORGC became the recipient of Innoviris (Brussels Capital Region) proof-of-concept funding to undertake a high-throughput screening of a commercial small molecule library to discovery lead compounds for further medicinal chemistry work. These small molecules will target a specific pathway in pancreatic cancer, whose characterization and functioning is being elucidated by our colleague and collaborator Prof. Ilse Rooman (VUB LMMO).
Pancreatic cancer has the worst five-year survival of all cancers and suffers from a severe lack of durable therapeutic options for patients. This project will open the much-needed door to small molecules on a novel pathway and will form the basis of much more of ORGC’s work in the years to come.
This project takes place alongside the EU-funded TRANSCAN project, for which Prof. Ballet (in collaboration with Prof. Rooman) has received funding. The TRANSCAN project looks, however, at the development of peptide-based inhibitors of this same pathway.