University HealthCare Alliance

February 10, 2020

Antiviral Treatments Lead Researchers to Develop Possible Cancer Drug

An effort to thwart viral diseases like hepatitis or the common cold led to a new collaboration and a novel class of cancer drugs that appears effective in mice.

Stanford virologist Jeffrey Glenn, MD, PhD, did not set out to tackle cancer. For years, he and his lab have worked to develop new ways of battling viruses like the ones that cause hepatitis delta and the common cold. But the lessons they’ve learned fighting viruses have led to a new kind of drug that has been effective at treating cancer in mice.

The underlying idea, Glenn said, is to disrupt otherwise normal cellular processes that both viruses and some cancer cells rely on to grow and spread. Now, tests in mice show that drugs based on that idea can shrink tumors and prevent their spread. 

A paper describing the findings was published Jan. 22 in Science Translational Medicine.

Development of the new drug could not have happened without an unusual series of events and collaborations that spanned several academic disciplines, said Glenn, professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology. His lab developed the compounds with the assistance of Stanford ChEM-H’s Medicinal Chemistry Knowledge Center and support from ViRx@Stanford, a National Institutes of Health-sponsored Center of Excellence for Translational Research led by Glenn.

“We’ve been working for many years on potent drugs that we had shown were important for viruses,” said Glenn, who is also a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute and ChEM-H. “This is just an important target that hasn’t really been appreciated in cancer, and we had the perfect drugs to get this started.”

An antiviral surprise

Originally, when they were looking for new ways to stop viruses such as hepatitis delta, Glenn and his colleagues thought they might try a sort of end run around the virus and target cell functions that viruses hijack to replicate and spread. That way, even if a virus does infect a cell, that’s more or less the end of it.

Glenn’s approach worked. In 2015, he and colleagues at the NIH showed that the new approach prevented hepatitis delta from replicating and releasing new copies of the virus in patients. Later, they modified their strategy to attack enterovirus 71, which is best known for causing hand, foot and mouth disease but can also lead to polio-like paralysis symptoms in children.

Glenn and his lab have continued to develop antiviral drugs, but their focus changed somewhat when their antiviral efforts caught the attention of Jonathan Kurie, MD, professor of thoracic/head and neck medical oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Kurie had learned that the same cellular processes Glenn and colleagues had successfully shut down was also involved in metastasis. After reading a paper describing the earliest compounds Glenn and his colleagues had developed, Kurie wrote Glenn asking for one of them.

“I told him we had much better molecules now, and we have known for a long time that they would also work in cancer,” Glenn said, and he sent along two new compounds that he had developed with Mark Smith, PhD, a senior research scientist at Stanford who heads the Medicinal Chemistry Knowledge Center.

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