Seminar:

Exploration of the existing drug space for novel pharmacological activities

April 18, 2013

Jun Liu

 
Drug discovery and development is a costly and time-consuming process. To accelerate the process, we assembled a library of known drugs, named the Johns Hopkins Drug Library (JHDL). To date, JHDL has been screened in a large number of target- and cell-based assays for novel inhibitors of a myriad of cellular processes.  Among the novel and interesting hits are inhibitors of angiogenesis that has been implicated in many diseases including cancer. Follow-up studies of some of the hits have shed new light on the regulation of endothelial cell proliferation and led to rapid translation of the findings to clinical testing.  These studies suggested that new drugs and drug leads can be discovered for existing drugs.