Research of new compounds as potential drugs against childhood cancers.

The research planned in this project is aimed at treating specific types of childhood cancers. The results ensuing from successful probe resolution will contribute to overall data useful for better targeted chemotherapy.

Although survival rates for childhood cancer, one of the most frequent causes of pediatric mortality and chronic morbidity, have risen sharply over the past 25 years, a large number of children are not cured. Further, the chemotherapy successively used in the case of survivors often has serious repercussions as side-effects: organ malfunction, secondary cancers, and problems with cognitive and overall development. For this reason, the search for and development of new drugs specially targeted to childhood cancers is of high priority.

Since these types of cancers are rare compared to adulthood cancers, they represent a very limited market. This is one of the main reasons that pediatric cancer models are rarely used for screening potent anti-cancer drugs and specific targeted therapy is virtually non-existent in this area. This is in sharp contrast to the large amount of data available on the molecular biology of tumors where multiple molecular targets have been identified. For these reasons, our project is focused on the introduction of new models for screening of compounds with preferential action in pediatric cancers and testing a series of our compounds.

During solving of grant project was prepared a serie of novel anti-cancer compounds. Some of them were subjected to advanced biological tests. From this point, the convenient bioavailable formulations were prepared and tested for their stability.