Chinese show interest to invest in drug company

Chinese investors have expressed their intent to invest in a drug discovery company, to develop a molecule invented by a city-based scientist.

K S Rangappa, who was vice chancellor of the University of Mysore and also Karnataka State Open University, has come up with a drug — a molecule named N-cyclopentyl-3-((4-(2,3-dichlorophenyl) piperazin-1-yl) (2-hydroxyphenyl)methyl) benzamide (NPB) — to treat all types of cancer, along with scientists in China. Now, Rangappa and his team are invited by the Chinese investors to set up a company at Ningbo city in China.

Rangappa said, “A series of video conferences were held since one month in this regard, due to Covid-19 lockdown. The Chinese investors are interested in developing our molecules as anti-cancer drugs. They are also interested in giving the responsibility of establishing the pharmaceutical company to me, along with Ningbo University. The final meeting with the investors was held on May 2, Saturday, through video conference, to start the Chinese Indian Drug Research and Development Centre in China.”

Rangappa is also a distinguished professor of University of Mysore, Institution of Excellence; General President of Indian Science Congress; UGC-BSR Faculty Fellow; and Chief Scientific Adviser to Hong Kong-based Sinotar Pharmaceutical (Schenzen).

Rangappa said that surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy are the major treatments now available for cancer.

“Besides, there are other types of treatment, depending on the kind of cancer. However, they have a lot of side-effects. Even then, the rate of survival is not encouraging. NPB is a drug-based treatment and can be adopted in chemotherapy. The NPB targets and attacks only affected cells in the human body and will affect healthy cells,” he said.

Rangappa said, “We designed and identified the molecule that specifically targets bcl2 family member gene called Bcl-2 agonist of cell death (BAD), which exists in higher amounts in cancer cells and forms a heterodimer with anti-apoptotic gene to stop the cancer ‘cell-death’, where most of the cancer cells escape this process and become immortal.”

Scientists C D Mohan, R Shobith and Basappa were lead by Rangappa and Peter E Lobie of Tsinghua University in China. “We unravelled the anti-cancer effects of BAD targeting molecule. Our work was published in ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, an American journal, earlier,” he said.

“BAD is a protein essential for driving cancer cells towards death. Cancer cells oppose their death by expressing increased concentration of proteins called Bcl-2. The inactivation of Bcl-2 or anti-apoptotic genes results in the induction of cancer cell-death. We initially designed the molecule targeting BAD gene, using cheminformatics platform that fitted with high-end computers and identified NPB as a lead structure, which can act as an anti-cancer agent against a wide range of cancers,” Rangappa explained.