High-Throughput Screening/Drug Discovery Lab

The High-Throughput Screening (HTS) / Drug Discovery Lab, one of many pediatric labs engaged in advanced pediatric cancer research at Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware, opened in May, 2011. As an integral part of the Nemours Center for Childhood Cancer Research (NCCCR), we use advanced robotic equipment that gives us the capability to screen thousands of potential drugs in a short time.

This key equipment, necessary for a fully functional HTS operation, was purchased with a generous donation from the B+ Foundation, and we have secured funding from the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, the I Care I Cure Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

We’re also working to identify more effective treatments for childhood leukemia.

Research Interests and Projects

The main focus of our work is to discover and develop new drugs to treat childhood leukemia. In particular, we are focused on MLL-rearranged leukemia, which strikes mainly infants and young children.

Expression of specific oncogenes (cancer-causing genes) prevents normal blood cell differentiation and triggers MLL-rearranged leukemia. Our goal is to test libraries of hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds against proteins that activate expression of these oncogenes. These chemical compounds will then be developed as targeted drugs for the treatment of MLL-rearranged leukemia.

To move discoveries from the lab bench to the care of patients, we have close ties with physicians, especially E. Anders Kolb, MD, who works with us to develop our early discoveries into drug candidates that we can test in the clinic.

We have collaborations in place with the University of Delaware; Loyola University Chicago; and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA. We have also recently begun work on a Nemours-funded project to discover new drugs for pediatric sarcomas.