Before FDA approval, before extensive animal testing and before any idea that medicine could be a cure for cancer, the first victories in the battle against one of America’s deadliest diseases will happen in a Petri dish.
Seven days a week, researchers at NuPotential, a biopharmaceutical company that works out of a second floor lab at the Louisiana Emerging Technology Center on the University’s east side of campus, conduct experiments looking for a cancer cure.Remedies for other debilitating diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
“Right now, we have a number of drug candidates that have demonstrated anticancer activity in Petri dishes,” said Ken Eilertsen, NuPotential’s founder and president.
Although Eilertsen acknowledged that a cure wouldn’t be available to humans for at least a decade or so, some drug candidates will begin the animal testing phases within the year, moving to human clinical trials within the next few years.
“Basically, we’re trying to develop novel therapies to treat diseases with unmet needs,” Eilertsen said.
A New Orleans native, Eilertsen founded NuPotential in 2005 when he moved back to Louisiana from Wisconsin to work at the University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center to study epigenetic and nuclear reprogramming.
The two fields make up the backbone of NuPotential’s disease research, with the growing field of epigenetics serving as the key to the fight against cancer, while experiments on other diseases like Alzheimer’s use cellular reprogramming.
Essentially, an epigenome is part of a cell’s nucleus that regulates whether specific genes are either “on” or “off” at the simplest level, Eilertsen said.
Many cancers spawn due to mixups in these instructions, such as a gene being turned on when it should be off. And although NuPotential’s drug candidates have yet to flip the switch, Eilertsen said they have shown anticancer activity in isolated culture systems, a good sign that gene power control may happen in the near future.
“His work is really important stuff,” said Arthur Cooper, executive director of LETC. “It’s nice to have that type of work going on in the state.”
NuPotential uses adult stem cells during experiments, which should not be confused with the controversial method of embryonic stem cell research, Eilertsen said.
For example, researchers may take an adult skin cell from a living human and convert it into what’s called an ipso, or induced pluripotent stem cell, that basically serves as a functional equivalent of an embryonic stem cell for research purposes, he said.
“They have very early patents so they’ve been kind of a pioneer in what they’re doing,” Cooper said.
Before his time at LSU, Eilertsen co-founded Infigen, a biotech company recognized for cloning the world’s first bovine from a non-embryonic cell. They named him “Gene.”
