Seminar

NMR in cancer research: searching for bladder cancer metabolic markers in urine and 19F-based screening for drug discovery

Ramón Campos-Olivas

The talk will illustrate the two main applications of high resolution NMR for cancer research that the Spectroscopy and NMR Unit at CNIO carries out. First, the 1H NMR spectra of urine samples from patients at different stages of bladder cancer disease (as well as negative control samples from subjects with benign urological problems) were collected from two different clinical settings, measured, and analyzed with multivariate statistical methods in search of possible metabolic markers. Although the preliminary analysis does not find a "signature" able to discriminate between cancer and controls, two metabolites show correlation with the presence (or absence) of cancer and will be investigated further. Second, a strategy based on the 19F NMR spectra of small organic molecules and their extreme sensibility to protein binding has been implemented, a collection of fluorinated compounds has been prepared, and screening has been conducted against two different protein targets with implications in cancer. The 19F- and 1H-based NMR methods for hit identification and binding characterisation will be illustrated with the results obtained for the two protein targets.