We congratulate Prof. Xiaohua Peng on receiving a National Institutes of Health award for $461,998.00. The grant is from the National Cancer Institute to study Novel DNA cross-linking agents and combination strategies for tumor-specific activation.
Dr. Peng’s research will be focusing on the development of novel ROS-activated anticancer prodrugs with improved tumor specificity and drug like property. They will also develop novel combination strategies of using selected pro-oxidants with ROS-activated prodrugs to achieve synergistic and durable antitumor effects while minimizing unwanted side-effects.
Dr. Peng’s group has already developed a H2O2-activated anticancer prodrug that showed in vivo efficacy and selectivity. Her group has demonstrated that vitamin C further enhanced the anticancer effect of the H2O2-activated prodrug by selectively intensifying H2O2 accumulation in cancer cells.