Nouri Neamati, associate professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health RO1 grant of $1.1 million to study drug design, delivery and imaging pertaining to cancer drugs.

Neamati’s work features a novel drug system that delivers antitumor effects to both tumor cells and the blood vessels that feed them. His hypothesis has its greatest potential in highly metastatic tumors, such as non-small cell lung cancer.

“Since this project examines solid tumors that express integrin on the cell surface, our findings should also apply to other cancers, including brain, breast, prostate, ovary and colon,” said Neamati, whose research is also supported by the American Association for Cancer Research, the Department of Defense and the American Lung Association.

Neamati works at the interface between the traditional laboratory and the computer lab. His expertise in computational drug design allows his lab to evaluate hundreds of thousands of compounds in the search for the right structure to do the job at hand.

His research has surfaced a number of compounds that have distinctively different structure and function qualities than known anticancer agents. This provides promise in lung cancer since many of the currently available chemo drugs are not effective against it.

“Our idea is to develop AV38, our highly selective integrin antagonist, as a novel antitumor agent for non-small cell lung cancer alone and in combination with currently used chemotherapy. We hypothesize that combining our targeted therapy with conventional therapy will increase efficacy without added toxicity to patients,” Neamati explained.

The research also calls for monitoring the effects of the agents through advanced imaging techniques.

“There are currently several agents that work to eliminate the integrin protein in cancer that have moved into preclinical and clinical trials. However, none of these studies are including non-small cell lung cancer. Our work fills this gap,” Neamati said.

Non-small cell lung cancer comprises 85 percent of all lung cancer cases. Currently, lung cancer is the leading cancer killer, ending the lives of more than 160,000 Americans each year.

Neamati’s research has support from the Louise Pfeiffer Research Foundation, the Susan Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the Whittier Foundation, the American Association of Cancer Research and the UniversityWide AIDS Research Program.