Wafik S. El-Deiry: My own experience with quinacrine

Wafik S. El-Deiry shared a post on X:

”Here is my own experience with quinacrine that has anti cancer activity but isn’t studied because it’s inexpensive and not of value to big pharma.

My lab became interested in quinacrine because acridines came up in one of our p53 pathway restoration screens years ago.

Acridine derivatives activate p53 and induce tumor cell death through Bax.

Authors: Wenge Wang, William C. Ho, David T. Dicker, Colin MacKinnon, Jeffrey D. Winkler, Ronen Marmorstein, Wafik S. El-Deiry.

I was excited to pursue translation of this precisely because there’s a lot of human use safety data experience going back to WWII and because a month of therapy while planning the clinical trial was about $30 per month per patient.

The translational work was not funded by NCI despite trying. My group of collaborators persisted and published the experience in our early phase trial where along the way as we were trying to complete the planned trial, available drug became unavailable due to FDA action against compounding pharmacies.

After 20+ years of effort without specifically focused grant funding, the preclinical and clinical work is out there to be pursued for the good of humanity.

This is the type of effort that investigators such as myself pursue with discretionary support to advance knowledge.

The NCI Clinical Oncology study section did not fund other original concepts including the combination of CDK4/6 inhibitor plus HSP90 inhibitor as a cancer therapy despite the FDA granting us an IND and us opening the trial for my final submission.

I had been trying for years with this concept and efforts were unsupported by NIH for unclear reasons other than not enough support from pharma.

Without NCI support the trial had little chance and sadly I had to shut it down thereby depriving patients and the community from getting valuable results. I would not have needed NCI support if pharma was more interested, hence the catch 22 and evidence in my opinion of systemic corruption.

I’m not sure if NIH supports therapeutic clinical trials research by independent investigators in the absence of pharma support and I honestly am not sure what that NIH clinical oncology study section funds that’s not supported or owned by pharma. I’m also not sure if many or most members of the NIH clinical oncology study section have ever held R01’s doing translational therapeutics research with original laboratory bench to clinical trial approaches. At this point in my career I have no interest in wasting time.”

Source: Wafik S. El-Deiry/X

Wafik El-Deiry, MD, PhD, FACP, FRSM, is the Associate Dean for Oncologic Sciences at the Warren Alpert Medical School and Director of the Legorreta Cancer Center at Brown University and Director of the Joint Program in Cancer Biology at Brown University and affiliated hospitals. He is the Editor in Chief at Oncotarget. Dr. El-Deiry discovered p21(WAF1) as a p53 target gene, cell cycle inhibitor, and tumor suppressor that explained the mammalian cell stress response. Dr. El-Deiry’s research is focused on mechanisms of therapy resistance with major efforts in drug discovery and development.