Andrew Napper, Ph.D, recently joined the research team at the Nemours Center for Childhood Cancer Research to establish its High Throughput Screening and Drug Discovery Laboratory. The goal of Napper’s work is to discover new drugs for childhood cancers.

The Nemours Center for Childhood Cancer Research (NCCCR), established in 2007, is a division of Nemours Biomedical Research headquartered at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children. Its mission is to integrate cancer research and clinical studies throughout the Nemours enterprise, including locations in Jacksonville, Orlando and Pensacola, Fla., in addition to the hospital in Wilmington. The NCCCR has grown quickly, securing more than $1,250,000 in external grant funding since 2008. The ultimate goal of NCCCR is to find cures for childhood cancers with minimal side effects.

Napper comes to Nemours from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the director of High Throughput Screening for the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery, one of the original 10 centers established as part of the National Institutes of Health’s Roadmap initiative to discover drugs for neglected diseases. Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, Napper conducted 16 years of drug discovery research in various biotechnology companies.

“I am very excited to join the NCCCR to establish the High Throughput Screening (HTS) and Drug Discovery Lab. This is a great opportunity to apply high-throughput drug discovery technologies to find novel targeted therapeutics for childhood cancers,” Napper said. “Nemours fosters close collaboration between researchers and clinicians and is very well positioned to translate discoveries made at the lab bench into clinical practice.”

“One of the strategies to achieve this goal is to discover targeted drugs for pediatric cancers,” says Ayyappan Rajasekaran, PhD, director of NCCCR.

Cancers found in children are inherently different from those commonly seen in adults, yet children are treated with drugs developed for adults. Although these drugs have saved the lives of many children, the side effects are severe. They most often affect health and development well beyond childhood and have a major impact throughout the lifespan of pediatric cancer survivors.

Recent advances in genomics have led to a much greater understanding of gene function and the corresponding proteins critical to the initiation and progression of cancer, presenting opportunities for discovery of drugs targeted specifically for children. HTS enables researchers to rapidly test thousands of chemical compounds to identify candidates for development into drugs targeted at specific cancer-related genes and proteins. While conventional manual methods allow testing of just a few compounds at a time, HTS screens thousands of potential drugs in a short time with the use of automated robotic equipment. In recent years, technological advances and improved affordability have made HTS, formerly the preserve of pharmaceutical companies, accessible to not-for-profit institutions such as Nemours.

The Andrew McDonough B+ Foundation awarded its first research grant for $250,000 to fund automated high throughput screening equipment, which Napper will use to accelerate the drug-discovery process to develop new therapies that could ultimately help cure pediatric cancer.

“The arrival of Dr. Napper and the significant grant from the Andrew McDonough B+ Foundation is the perfect convergence of the right person with the right technology to expand our innovative research efforts to diagnosis and treat pediatric cancers,” said Rajasekaran.