Discovery of semi-synthetic aurones that act as anti-cancer drugs. Scientific Reports, 2019

The first research paper from the lab has been published! This project was done by our high schooler (who is now killing it at Harvard) Shea Hausman, in collaboration with Chunming Liu’s and Dave Watt’s groups at UK. They made several new compounds, and we were able to test them in our leukemia cells and zebrafish models to see if there was any effect on toxicity or cancer growth. One of the new compounds was found to block cancer cell cycle, and could prevent prostate cancer growth in mice and leukemia progression in our zebrafish! We were happy to be part of their exciting study, and Shea was able to do all of the fish work herself! Not only does this show that zebrafish can play an important role in the development of new cancer drugs, but this is the 2nd paper from the lab that involves protein structures–our cancer biology group is turning into biochemists 🙂 Read our paper here: Xie et al. Scientific Reports 2019.