On the Fast Track
This is an excerpt of a story that first appeared in Weill Cornell Medicine,Vol. 14, No. 2.
In fall 2013, Weill Cornell Medicine joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and The Rockefeller University to form the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI), a nonprofit devoted to fast-tracking early-stage drug development. Founded by two major gifts from Weill Cornell Medicine overseers — $15 million from Lewis and Ali Sanders and $5 million from Howard and Abby Milstein — Tri-I TDI is a kind of incubator whose goal is to transform fledgling discoveries into promising treatments for some of the world's deadliest diseases, bringing them to the proof-of-concept stage where drug companies might invest in them for further development. At the time of its founding, the institute announced that it had formed an alliance with an industry leader: Japan's largest pharmaceutical firm, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd.
Dr.Yariv Houvras, right, with Dr. Ritu Kumar, an assistant professor of cell and developmental biology in surgery.
For medical oncologist Yariv Houvras, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of medicine, funding from Tri-I TDI came at the perfect time. His lab uses zebrafish as a model organism to study cancer; working with Minkui Luo, Ph.D., a Weill Cornell Medicine associate professor of pharmacology who leads a lab at Sloan Kettering, Dr. Houvras is targeting an enzyme called SET8, which is associated with the proliferation of cancer cells. After putting a small-molecule inhibitor of SET8 on zebrafish embryos, Dr. Houvras and his team saw a specific effect on melanocytes, the pigment cells that give rise to melanoma.
"We believe that if we can interfere with that biochemical activity," he says, "We can stop cancer cells from growing."
Yet the project faltered once the group got to the point of developing a preliminary chemical compound, prompting him to seek out Tri-I TDI — without whose intervention, Dr. Houvras believes, the research would still be at a standstill.
"Compounds that work in cells, or will work in animals like zebrafish, usually don't have drug-like properties that would make them appropriate for treating humans," he says. "That's where the partnership with Takeda comes in. They can help turn compounds into actual drugs. That's an important goal, because ultimately we want to treat patients."