The purpose of this meeting is to announce and define the goals, process and procedures for the NCI’s Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) Program and of the newly created Chemical Biology Consortium (CBC). The Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis (DCTD) and the Center for Cancer Research (CCR) are working in close collaboration to reinvigorate cancer drug development at NCI. Through a joint early therapeutics development program, extramural and intramural teams have prioritized a pipeline of NCI-driven targeted therapeutics for development. This program, called the NCI Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) program, combines the strengths of DCTD’s extensive expertise in anticancer drug development with CCR’s dynamic in-house research and its location within state-of-the-art facilities at the NIH Clinical Center. To further augment the discovery efforts of the NCI, DCTD is creating the Chemical Biology Consortium to enable the use and development of ultra-High Throughput Assays related to targets of interest for the purpose of developing hits that can then be optimized through iterative cycles of medicinal chemistry during the progression from in silico to in vitro to in vivo studies to define the anti-tumor activity of these new molecular entities.

List of speakers:

Dr. John Niederhuber, Director, NCI
Dr. James H. Doroshow, Director, DCTD
Dr. Joseph E. Tomaszewski, Deputy Director, DCTD
Dr. L. Michelle Bennett, Deputy Director, CCR
Dr. Jamie Zweibel, Chief, Investigational Drug Branch, CTEP, DCTD, NCI
Dr. Kristina Vouri, Burnham Institute for Medical Research
Dr. John Lazo, University of Pittsburg Drug Discovery Institute
Dr. W. Blaine Knight, Southern Research Institute
Dr. Lidia Sambucetti, SRI International
Dr. Milton Brown, Georgetown University
Dr. Gunda Georg, University of Minnesota
Dr. Donna Huryn, University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Gary Sulikowski, Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology
Dr. Haian Fu, Emory University
Dr. James Wells, University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Stephen Frye, University of North Carolina
Dr. Chris Austin, NCGC, NIDR, NIH

For more information, visit http://dctd.cancer.gov/About/major_initiatives_NExt.htm