Qinheng Zheng is taking unusual approaches to find new ways to treat cancers.
Rather than pursuing cutting-edge gene therapy or sophisticated biologics, he is banking on relatively simple chemistry to create affordable, game-changing small-molecule medicines.
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Since joining the faculty in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School in June as assistant professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, Zheng has been working to identify the first targeted treatments that can repair the effects of damaged genes that are meant to suppress tumor growth. He thinks his techniques — dubbed restorative pharmacology — can help him bring hope to millions of cancer patients a year, and he’s trying to do it in a hurry.
Once a drug target is identified, it often takes decades until a chemical compound is developed that can hit the bullseye and become a useful medicine. To speed up the process, Zheng is using a recent, Nobel Prize-winning technique called click chemistry to synthesize thousands of drug candidates overnight and identify the most promising ones.
Harvard Medicine News spoke with Zheng to learn more about how he hopes to move molecules from test tubes to patients as quickly and effectively as possible.
