Description

A keynote lecture by Jonathan Sessler, Professor of Chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin.

ABOUT THIS LECTURE

This lecture will present a personal story of a 3x cancer survivor and how, with the assistance of great coworkers and collaborators, he made an effort to fight back against this disease by studying chemistry and anti-cancer biology of texaphyrins and, more recently, gold-carbene redox-active systems.

Texaphyrins are a specific class of expanded porphyrin (a term we introduced into the literature in 1988 to describe larger homologs of natural blood pigments) that form stable 1:1 complexes with trivalent lanthanide cations, such as Gd(III) and Lu(III). The parent form of the texaphyrins were the founding technology for Pharmacyclics, a company that ultimately developed Imbruvica® (a covalent BTK inhibitor) before being acquired by AbbVie in 2015. Building on early clinical studies at Pharmacyclics, efforts in the PI's laboratory and that of collaborators have focused on developing Pt(IV) conjugates of texaphyrins as possible drug leads in overcoming platinum-resistant colon and ovarian cancer. This work has recently (Sept. 2019) been licensed to the IQ Global Group and is the basis for a new company, OncoTex.

Recent explorations involving gold-based carbenes have also led to the discovery of a set of compounds designed to act as dual-targeting agents on the mechanistic level. These agents serve as triggers of immunogenic cell death and show promise as possible cancer vaccines. Currently, Cible, Inc. in Dr. Sessler has an equity interest, has rights to this technology. The above drug discovery efforts will be the subject of this presentation. As time permits, other expanded porphyrin work from the Austin group will also be discussed, as will new forays into the area of soft materials, including the development of information coding systems and hydrogel-based Rubik's CubeTM systems.

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