Khalid Bashir, MBBS, assistant professor in the School of Medicine Department of Medicine and Tal Teitz, PhD, assistant professor in the School of Medicine Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, with support from the School of Medicine’s Clinical Research Office, have been awarded a $423,766 grant from Dialysis Clinic Inc (DCI) for their research project, “Developing small molecule kinase inhibitors to combat cisplatin-induced kidney injury.”
Despite its potent antitumor effect, the clinical use of cisplatin is dose-limited by nephrotoxicity which is most commonly manifested as acute or chronic renal dysfunction. As a result, discontinuing therapy with cisplatin is generally indicated in those who develop evidence of progressive renal impairment. More than half of patients also suffer after cisplatin treatment irreversible hearing loss. To date, no drugs have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for protection from cisplatin-induced kidney damage or hearing loss.
In this work, Bashir and Teitz will test three top compound hits that came up in their unbiased high-throughput screens of 4,385 bioactive compounds and 187 highly-specific kinase inhibitors for cisplatin-induced cell-death protection in a cochlear ear cell line. Importantly, all three hits are orally bioavailable anti-cancer compounds already tested for treatment in patients and thus can be rapidly repurposed for treatment against cisplatin-induced kidney injury.
