Discovery and Development of Natural Products for Cancer Interception and Prevention (DDNP-CIP)

There are ~500,000 semi-purified products of plants, marine life, and microbes in the NCI Natural Product Collection

The Discovery and Development of Natural Products for Cancer Interception and Prevention Program (DDNP-CIP) supports the discovery and development of new natural products that are safe, non-toxic, and efficacious for cancer interception and prevention. Only a small percentage of natural products have been screened and evaluated. Advances in robust high-throughput screening (HTS) strategies and medicinal chemistry could change the pharmaceutical landscape for developing new cancer interception-prevention strategies. Research on screening natural products for specific clinically relevant pathways and targets for cancer interception and prevention has been limited.

NCI currently boasts one of the most diverse libraries of semi-purified natural product samples in the world, which are available to researchers for further testing. These unique resources overcome many of the deficiencies of historical screening approaches by providing quality-controlled samples associated with informatics support. NCATS has a HTS facility and medicinal chemistry support for the optimization of drug leads. The generation, characterization, and validation of representative HTS approaches will significantly improve the ability to select natural agents that can be successfully translated from the scientific setting to clinical practice. This, in turn, will give patients alternative and less toxic options for preventive interventions.

Grant applicants’ projects with clinically relevant cancer interception pathways and targets can take advantage of NCI’s large library of “ready-to-screen,” pre-fractionated natural products to speed up bioassay-directed isolation and characterization of the most promising ones. Applicants can also propose to use commercial libraries, investigator-developed libraries, and robust HTS strategies. New natural agents discovered will move to the existing advanced preclinical development program, PREVENT, for further development towards early-phase cancer prevention clinical trials by DCP CP-CTNet.

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