Cancer Therapy Using Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide Antagonists
Description of Invention:
The second leading cause of death in the United States is cancer and more than one million Americans are diagnosed with cancer each year, with this number likely to increase as the population ages. There remains a need for effective therapeutics with improved safety profiles, and promising results can be obtained through targeting receptors which are highly expressed on specific cancers. Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide (VIP) is a 28 amino-acid peptide hormone and one of several small neuropeptides that can function as autocrine growth factors. VIP mediates a variety of physiological responses and has been shown to exert stimulating and trophic effects on neoplastic cells inducing its own receptors by feedback mechanisms. Studies have shown that VIP receptors are present in many epithelial cancers including breast, colon, non-small cell lung carcinoma, and pancreatic and prostate cancers. Work by NIH scientists and their collaborators has shown that VIP receptor antagonists such as the lipophilic VIP antagonist SNH inhibit the growth of cancer cell lines in vitro and in vivo and potentiate the cytotoxicity of chemotherapeutic drugs. For example, results have shown that SNH and taxol are synergistic at inhibiting breast cell cancer growth and can potentiate the cytotoxicity of taxol in an in vivo human xenograft breast cancer mouse model.
Combination therapy using these agents may therefore greatly enhance the response rate of different cancers to these drugs and may significantly reduce side effects by permitting a lower therapeutic dose to be administered. Available for licensing are compositions of matter and methods of use of VIP receptor antagonists.
Inventors:
T. Moody (NCI) D. Brenneman (NICHD) et al.
Patent Status:
DHHS Reference No. E-009-1991/0 --
U.S. Patent No. 5,217,953 issued 08 Jun 1993
DHHS Reference No. E-009-1991/1 --
U.S. Patent No. 5,565,424 issued 15 Oct 1996
DHHS Reference No. E-301-1998/2 --
U.S. Patent No. 6,630,124 issued 07 Oct 2003
Worldwide IP coverage
Portfolios: Internal Medicine Cancer
Cancer -Therapeutics Internal Medicine-Therapeutics Internal Medicine-Other
For Additional Information Please Contact: Surekha Vathyam Ph.D.
Office of Technology Transfer
6011 Executive Blvd, Suite 325
Rockville, MD 20852-3804
Phone: 301/435-4076
Email: vathyams@mail.nih.gov
Fax: 301/402-0220
