Molecular mechanistic calculations for designing anti Glioblastoma multiforme cancer drugs
Abstract
Survivin is one of the proteins that is expressed differentially in normal and cancer cells. These proteins are directly or indirectly involved in numerous pathways required for tumor maintenance. Its expression has been detected at early stages of cancer and it is expressed in almost all cancers. These properties make survivin an obvious target for cancer therapeutics. But even with these promising features there the clinical trials targeting survivin have seen limited success.
Our work will focus on studies of protein – protein interaction of wild type survivin and its isoforms with different integrins that they interact with at different stages of cell signaling. This will involve micro seconds simulations to study the protein dynamics and understand the biological functions downstream. These dimers will be further used to screen large libraries of small compounds using virtual screening methods to find potential survivin inhibitors to target Glioblastoma multiforme cancer stem cells.
