The search for effective new treatments for liver cancer has led Mount Sinai investigators to highly targeted compound libraries that include kinase inhibitors, histone modifying enzymes, and other small molecules used in combination with novel animal and organoid models.
Kinases play central roles in most cancer networks and many make excellent therapeutic targets for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the fourth leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally. But the limited effects of current kinase inhibitors to treat patients with HCC reveal the weakness of any research strategy that is focused on kinases alone.
Investigators at The Tisch Cancer Institute—under the leadership of Ernesto Guccione, PhD, and Arvin Dar, PhD, both Professors of Oncological Sciences and Pharmaceutical Sciences—are taking a much broader approach. They are exploring highly targeted compound libraries that include kinase inhibitors, as well as histone modifying enzymes and other small molecules used in combination with novel animal and organoid models that are genetically representative of the majority of HCC patients.