TWiPO #7 ~ Interview with E. Anders Kolb and Andrew Napper on drug development

June 02, 2011

In this seventh episode of "This Week in Pediatric Oncology" TWiPO podcast, host Dr. Tim Cripe interviews Dr. E. Anders Kolb and Dr. Andrew Napper  from Nemours in Wilmington, Delaware.

This informative discussion covers the strategies, scope, and challenges of target discovery, drug development, and preclinical testing for pediatric cancers, a complex process that has been accelerated by high throughput screening technology that has only recently become available in academic settings.

Dr. Kolb is the Director of Blood and Bone Marrow Transplantation at Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, and Head of the Cancer Therapeutics Laboratory at Nemours Biomedical Research. He is also a Principal Investigator in the Pediatric Preclinical Testing Program (PPTP), a comprehensive program to systematically evaluate new agents against childhood solid tumor and leukemia models.

Dr. Andrew Napper joined the research team at the Nemours Center for Childhood Cancer Research (NCCCR) in 2009 to establish its High Throughput Screening and Drug Discovery Laboratory. Dr. Napper came to Nemours from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Director of High Throughput Screening for the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery, one of the original ten centers established as part of the National Institutes of Health’s Roadmap initiative to discover drugs for neglected diseases.

For more information on this program and technology:

Lab Offer Hope for Kids with Cancer, Wilmington News Journal (8/24/09)

Academic screening goes high-throughput, Nature Methods 7, 787–792 (2010)

Please send questions and comments to twipo@solvingkidscancer.org