Research Projects

Novel safe anticancer drug candidates to battle metastatic melanoma

Anticancer drug candidates derived from animal-venoms

Malignant melanoma is one of the most lethal types of skin cancer, whose incidence has been significantly increased in the last 50 years. Melanoma at early stages of prognosis is treatable by surgical resection. However, at advanced or metastatic stages paints a more complicate picture. Indeed, metastatic melanoma has a poor prognosis, representing about 90% of skin cancer mortality. Approximately half of metastatic melanomas harbor a mutation in the BRAF gene, with V600E being the most prominent driver. Targeted approaches (combination of BRAF and MEK inhibitors) and immune checkpoint inhibitors have achieved unprecedent outcomes in advanced or metastatic melanoma patients harbouring the BRAF mutation. It is documented that the use of targeted therapy with immunotherapy, either in sequence or in combination, leads to additional improvements in the overall survival for melanoma patients. However, it remains a significant number of metastatic or advanced melanoma patients which is unresponsive to the current regimes, show adverse effects, or develop drug-resistance and eventually succumb to their disease. Hence, metastatic melanoma is still an unmet medical challenge. In this project, we address the need for safe regimes to arrest metastasis and drug resistance by looking into the therapeutic potentials of animal toxins with the prospect of identifying novel agent candidates against melanoma of BRAF (V600E) mutation.