Stopping the Spread: A New Way to Fight Cancer Metastasis

Cancer metastasis, the process by which cancer cells spread from the original tumor to other parts of the body, is the primary cause of cancer-related deaths. Stopping this process is one of the most critical goals in cancer research.

Our research, published in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters, explores a new approach to fighting metastasis. The paper, "Design, synthesis and prostate cancer cell-based studies of analogs of the Rho/MKL1 transcriptional pathway inhibitor, CCG-1423," focuses on a specific pathway within cancer cells that drives their ability to invade and spread.

We identified a compound called CCG-1423 that inhibits this "pro-metastatic" pathway, and we used it as a starting point to design and create a family of new compounds with a similar structure. Our goal was to create a compound with improved properties that could one day be a new drug.

Using a prostate cancer cell model, we showed that these new compounds were highly effective at blocking the cellular pathway that allows cancer cells to invade. This work is significant because it provides a new set of chemical tools that can be used to study this critical pathway, and it offers a promising new class of compounds for developing therapies to prevent cancer from spreading.

For more information, please see the full publication here.