Bioefficacy / Toxicology Studies

In vitro scoring for screening anti cancer compounds

Signal transduction networks play a key role in the regulation of myriad essential cellular responses. The tyrosine kinases are enzymes that have a central role in signal transduction. EGFR-TK is one such transmembrane receptor tyrosine kinase and its over expression has been detected in all stages of tumor progression. The over expression may be the result of excess ligand expression or high expression of EGFR, activating mutation, failure of inactivation mechanisms, or transactivation through receptor dimerization. Signalling through EGFR-TK is pleotropic both in terms of the multiple signaling pathways that are activated and in terms of the biologic downstream effects. Therefore, EGFR-TK is an attractive drug target for inhibiting cancer. Set of synthetic in-house compounds which are synthesized based on the classical data with respect to EGFR are under the process of screening in in vitro system.

As a first step towards the evaluation of the cytotoxic potential of the proposed compounds, a screen which consists of a panel of human cancer cell lines is used for various cell based assays. The in vitro studies will be followed by in vivo studies on tumor induced rats.