Published April 12, 2021
By Mark Henderson
Special to ULM Office of Marketing and Communications
The National Institutes of Health awarded $1.65 million to fund cancer research being
done by Seetharama Jois, Ph.D., a professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the School of
Basic Pharmaceutical and Toxicological Sciences at the University of Louisiana Monroe
College of Pharmacy.
PHOTO: Seetharama Jois, Ph.D., a professor at the ULM College of Pharmacy, has received a
$1.65 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund cancer research
at the university.
Siddharth Gaulee/ULM Photo Services
The research will be carried out in collaboration with Yong-Yu Liu, M.D., Ph.D., a
cancer pharmacologist at the ULM College of Pharmacy, and a lung-cancer researcher
from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
Director of the Office of Sponsored Programs and Research LaWanna Gilbert-Bell, said,
"This is the second R01 awarded by NIH to the University since 2016. This is the highest
award possible from the NIH. It reiterates and highlights the profound research being
conducted by our distinguished faculty."
"What we are looking for is this: Will it work orally? We will check for the development
of resistance, and find new ways to treat non-small cell lung cancer"
Seetharama Jois, Ph.D.
ULM College of Pharmacy
"ULM's faculty and staff continue to do remarkable things to ensure that our research
matters and we remain a relevant force in public health," said John W. Sutherlin,
Ph.D., Chief Innovation & Research Officer.
Jois is working with proteins from sunflower seeds, modifying them in the laboratory
using mini-proteins called peptides to arrest the rapid growth of lung-cancer cells.
The process is called grafting.
"There are different kinds of lung cancer. I'm specifically looking at non-small cell
lung cancer, which affects 85 percent of lung-cancer patients," Jois said.
Properties of peptide drugs can be beneficial to the body, but the problem, Jois said,
is finding a way to deliver the drug.
"If we give the peptide drug orally, it will be digested, and it won't work. We can
deliver the drug through IV, and it would work for a short time, but it will eventually
get digested as well."
The use of the sunflower seed protein provides a stable platform, keeping the peptides
from breaking up.
"I can make the unstable peptide stable through grafting, replacing some of the chemical
group of the sunflower seed protein with what I want in the lab," Jois said.
Jois is concentrating on non-small cell lung cancer because "This type of lung cancer
is hard to cure, and the survival rate of these patients is poor.”
Cancer spreads when affected cells multiply at a rapid rate. The problem with current
treatments, Jois said, is that chemotherapy kills healthy cells as well as cancerous
ones.
Jois also said available therapeutic agents help only a small number of patients,
and they often develop resistance.
The grafted sunflower seed protein is being tested to see if the chemical interaction
that causes cancer to spread can be interrupted.
Jois is testing the protein on cancer cells grown in a lab. "We have to make sure
it does not kill noncancerous cells," he said. The next step is testing in a model
system.
"What we are looking for is this: Will it work orally? We will check for the development
of resistance, and find new ways to treat non-small cell lung cancer," Jois said.
The NIH grant will support research for five years.
