Erxi Wu, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences, has been invited as a guest editor for a hot topic issue for Current Medicinal Chemistry. Wu has edited 12 papers from the U.S. and China for his thematic issue titled "Discovering new anticancer activities from old drugs."
"Despite decades of biomedical research and advances in pharmaceutical science, cancer remains a major obstacle of public health worldwide," Wu said. "The development of anti-cancer drugs also presents challenges in cost, time required for deployment from bench to the bedside and lack of certainty in clinical efficacy. It is estimated that de novo anti-cancer drug discovery carries costs ranging from $500 million to $2 billion and up to 10-17 years in development time before a successful launch."
According to Wu, a number of recently tested anti-cancer candidate drugs offer promising possibilities, but less than 10 percent show consistent and significant benefits in patients and warrant costly launch and marketing. To counter the exorbitant cost of drug development exacerbated by high failure rates, Wu said considerable efforts have been directed at discovering novel anti-tumor activities in some old drugs.
For example, thalidomide, developed and sold by the German pharmaceutical company Grunenthal in the 1950s as a mild sedative for morning sickness and later discontinued owing to its toxic teratogenic effects, has recently gained notoriety in demonstrating efficacy in several human diseases including Erythema Nodosum leprosum, autoimmune disorders, AIDS and multiple myeloma.
"This special issue of Current Medicinal Chemistry introduces promising drug candidates for repositioning, describes novel methods and approaches to uncover new uses such as anticancer activities for existing drugs, and summaries the progress of drug repositioning and its impact on drug discovery with a focus on anticancer drug development," Wu said.
Current Medicinal Chemistry covers the latest developments in medicinal chemistry and rational drug design. Each issue contains a series of timely in-depth reviews and original research articles written by leaders in the field covering a range of the current topics in medicinal chemistry.
Wu's laboratory research interests include tumor therapeutic targets, drug discovery and biomarkers. For more information about Wu's lab, visit www.ndsu.edu/pharmsci/faculty_staff/erxi_wu.
NDSU is recognized as one of the nation's top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.