Dr Mudasir Nabi Peerzada is the first Kashmiri to publish in Pharmacology & Therapeutics, a high impact journal. His research is as fresh as this achievement – a shift in cancer treatment, precision and efficacy upgraded.
In his own words, this scientist from Muqam Shahwali area of Drugmulla Kupwara explains what his paper has been able to uncover.
“We delineated the privileged anticancer chemical scaffolds that are effective against multiple chemotherapeutic targets in tumorigenesis and filled one of the important clinical requisites in this challenging field. This we did when we introduced the novel tactic for cancer drug design and development that will serve as the hopeful approach for humankind in drug discovery against several targets, and circumvent the multidrug resistance obstacle in the treatment of complex malignancies,” he said.
Many science news portals have said that the optimization of various chemical groups at specific locations of the discovered privileged pharmacophores in this study would lead to the improvement in response to cancer chemotherapy by inhibiting GTP driven tubulin polymerization process, tumor associated human kinome and hCAIX activity. “This research would also help the scientists to tackle the cytotoxicity and target specificity issues in discovering the potent antitumor agents to save lives and serve the human kind,” Dr Peerzada said.
The research work was conducted in collaboration with a team of internationally recognized scientists from National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, USA and University of Florence, Italy. The scientists who are part of the conducted research include Dr. Ernest Hamel (MD, PhD, USA), Dr. Rouli (PhD, USA), Professor Claudiu Trandafir Supuran (PhD, Europe) and Professor Amir Azam (PhD, JMI). Dr Hamel discovered the CSA4 antitumor drug along with Professor G. R. Pettit in 1989 and he is presently the senior investigator at National Cancer Institute, NIH, Maryland USA, where he is mentoring the group of scientists. Professor Supuran is the inventor of SLC-0111 antitumor agent, discoverer of eta-carbonic anhydrases and having more than 95000 citations. He is the most cited scientist in the field of cancer drug discovery research in the world having more than 1700 research papers to his credit and forty years of research experience in this field.
This research entitled as “Deciphering the key heterocyclic scaffolds in targeting microtubules, kinases and carbonic anhydrases for cancer drug development”is published inthe high impact medical journal “Pharmacology & Therapeutics”(5 year impact factor 11.40). This journal is included in the Index Medicus. Dr. Peerzada becomes the first and youngest researcher to have the publication to his credit in this reputed medical journal from the country as the lead author.
Dr Peerzada is the principal scientist of this research. He is currently working with Dr Saurab Verma (Scientist E) as postdoctoral fellow at National Institute of Pathology (ICMR), Safdarjung Hospital New Delhi. He is set to join the Barry Victor Lloyd group of cancer research at the medical sciences division, University of Oxford, London. The anticancer drug candidates discovered by Dr Peerzada are currently undergoing investigations in various laboratories in the USA and Europe. He was awarded CSIR-SRF fellowship by Government of India while doing doctoral research. He is working on drug discovery taking into account the hinge region and ATP binding pocket of kinases, zinc bound histidine residues of carbonic anhydrases, and development of antimitotic agents to arrest cell cycle at G2/M phase for cancer treatment. He is also working on lead optimizations of lapatinib for improvement in efficacy against aggressive HER2 positive metastatic breast cancers.