The Discovery and Development of Natural Products for Cancer Interception and Prevention (DDNP-CIP) Program’s overall research objectives are as follows:
- Identification and selection of clinically relevant cancer interception pathways and targets, and the development of robust high-throughput screening strategies. Development of specific cell-based and/or cell-free assays to screen non-toxic natural agents.
- High-throughput screening, purification, and structure elucidation of active natural compounds. Medicinal chemistry or other novel strategies such as click chemistry development for optimization of any drug leads.
- Development of models with predictive value for positive efficacy outcomes in the clinic that could be used to guide the selection of preventive agents active in HTS assays.
The flow chart shows the steps for discovery and development of natural products (NP) for cancer interception and prevention. The research may use a design along the continuum (such as clinically relevant cancer interception target selection and verification in both preclinical in vivo and clinical samples, assay development or validation, prototype high-throughput screening (HTS), pilot and full scale HTS using NCI libraries with greater than 500,000 semi-purified NP samples or investigator owned libraries, optimization of drug leads (through medicinal chemistry efforts), purification and structural elucidation of active natural compounds, secondary screening, in vivo testing, and dose optimization) with the NCI DCP, DCTD or NCATS support. Once promising interventions with in vivo efficacies and lack of toxicities are identified, these natural agents can enter the NCI PREVENT pipeline for advanced preclinical development followed by moving to clinical trials through CP-CTNet program.