World Drug Delivery Summit

Biography

Biography: Bulent Ozpolat

Abstract

After recent discovery, the use of small interfering RNA (siRNA) has rapidly become a powerful tool for silencing oncogenes and holds promise as a novel class of therapeutics in cancer. siRNA based therapeutic intervention can be uses especially for those targets that cannot be targeted by small inhibitors or for “non drugable” targets. However, successful clinical applications and in vivo delivery of the siRNA-based therapeutics to primary and metastatic tumors remains as a great challenge. We recently identified eEF2-kinase in solid tumorssuch as breast and pancreatic cancer developed tumor targeting nanoliposomes that can target siRNA in vivo into tumor cells more effectively than regular liposomes, leading to significant and robust target gene silencing for about a week in breast, ovarian and prostate cancers animal models. Overall, our preclinical studies demonstrated that highly specific targeting of genes promoting cell proliferation, survival, tumor growth, invasion ad progression including EF2-kinase (Ef2K) and Bcl-2, EphA2 genes by liposomal siRNA nanotherapeutics significantly inhibited tumor growth in breast, ovarian and prostate cancers, respectively, as well as hematological tumor models such as lymphoma. Our data suggest that siRNA based nanotherapies have potential as novel class of systemic therapies for various cancers and provide the proof of concept and the impetus for translational studies for Phase I clinical trials in patients.