U of T research sparks potential new leukemia drug discovery
Faculty News
By
Heidi Singer
University of Toronto-affiliated scientists have created a first-of-its-kind treatment for leukemia that has attracted potentially record-breaking funding and will start trials on cancer patients in Ontario.
The groundwork for the potential new drug was laid by Professor Cheryl Arrowsmith, chief scientist of the U of T-affiliated Structural Genomic Consortium (SGC), working with a team of scientists from the SGC’s chemical probe program, including biologist Dalia Barsyte and Masoud Vedadi, who is also an assistant professor in U of T's department of pharmacology and toxicology.
The SGC collaborated with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) drug discovery group, led by Rima Al-awar, an associate professor in the department of pharmacology and toxicology, in an open science collaboration that discovered the first inhibitor to a new drug target, WDR5.
