Rutgers Researcher Receives a $2 Million Five-Year NIH Grant to Advance New Generation of Cancer Treatments

From left to right: Liming Wang, Bridget Broncales, Melih Baci, Yuhyun Kim, Clinton Adu, Shuvon Islam, Mark Dresel and Enver Cagri Izgu. Seated on a lab stools left to right: Dorsa Ebrahimi and Sarah Cho.

A researcher and assistant professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology has received the Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance nucleic acid therapies as new generation treatments of cancer.

Enver Cagri Izgu, from the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers-New Brunswick, and his team will use a nearly $2 million NIH grant to develop diverse molecules with "programmed functionality" to address the fundamental challenges in therapeutic approaches that rely on modulating gene expression.

The scientific community considers nucleic acid therapeutics to have the potential for long-lasting or permanent treatments and cures through gene modulation. However, several challenges could limit the use of nucleic acid therapy in healthcare, including poor target selectivity, biostability, and bioavailability, among others.

"Our lab is approaching these problems by designing chemical biology tools that are highly sophisticated and adaptable," said Izgu. "The nature of the disease will determine which type of cell we will be working on and which targeting mechanism our molecular tools will utilize. This NIH-supported program will focus on some of the aggressive cancer types, including those with low survival rates. As part of our strategy, we aim to suppress the production of proteins associated with cancer cell growth and proliferation. In accordance, we will work on cancer cells with oncogenic levels of protein expression."

Izgu asserts that his team will be using organic chemistry to integrate programmable functionality into both small molecules and oligonucleotides (short DNA or RNA molecules that have a wide range of applications in genetic testing, research and forensics) to serve as sophisticated therapeutics with robust selectivity and efficacy. He believes that following the successful implementation of their design approach, they will be able to explicitly target the disease-associated RNA, whether that is messenger RNA (mRNA), which encodes the information for protein synthesis, or a non-coding RNA (ncRNA) involved in regulating RNA translation.

The NIH MIRA program provides investigators with greater stability and flexibility to enhance scientific productivity and the chances for key breakthroughs.

"The Office for Research (OfR) has supported our journey to the NIH MIRA," said Izgu. "OfR's Busch Biomedical Grant program helped us lay the groundwork for nucleic acid-derived systems to probe cancer biomarkers within cells. After successfully demonstrating a working prototype, we expanded the scope of disease detection and secured funding from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering via the NIH Trailblazer Award. While we continued to develop these systems, additional support from the Rutgers HealthAdvance program helped us explore chemical methods to eradicate healthcare-associated infections."

Izgu added, "My group members' collective efforts during the Busch Biomedical Grant, NIH Trailblazer, and HealthAdvance projects facilitated an impactful NIH MIRA application."

"Dr. Izgu's research has the potential to place many arrows in the quiver for the advancement of nucleic acid therapy approaches," said Pragati Sharma, associate director of commercialization funding within the New Ventures unit of the Office for Research. "This award from the NIH will provide him with critical resources to investigate all the potential benefits of his work. The Office for Research is proud to support him in his efforts."

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