Anti-cancer drug discovery and targeted drug delivery projects
The aim of this project series is to design, synthesize and investigate the biological effects of metal-based, natural products and semi-synthetic molecules using molecular docking.
In light of this project, we are evaluating the role of these molecules on different molecular pathways and cell lines mainly small cancer cells, targeting genes especially, the HIF protein, EZRIN, SLUG, TP63 and HER2.
In these projects, we are collaborating mainly with the Toretsky-Uren Lab from Georgetown University (USA) and the Departments of Biology and Chemistry from Gaziantep University (Turkey).
Biomarker discovery for lung cancer and chronic lung diseases
Our study is based on the collection of different body fluid samples including serum, and bronchial lavage fluid from patients, and using proteomic approaches, to diagnose the related diseases.
Also, we are evaluating the effects of the serum samples derived from Covid19 pneumonia patients on bronchial epithelial and cancer cells.
In this project, with collaborating Department of Thoracic Surgery and the Department of Pathology at Cukurova University, we plan to optimize a panel of drug screening in patients’ tumor samples
Extracellular vesicle and miRNA studies
These studies are based on the evaluation of the hypoxic regulation of non-coding RNAs in Lung Cancers: In this project, we use two commercially available and 4 primary lung cancer cell lines and study both intracellular and exosomal non-coding RNAs :
a) To understand the expression regulation of non-coding RNAs under hypoxic conditions and
b) To evaluate the role of exosomal non-coding RNAs during hypoxia.