Areas of Specialization
Our primary goal is to develop more effective chemotherapeutic
agents for cancer patients. Multidrug resistance (MDR)
represents a major obstacle to the treatment of cancer, and
understanding the resistance mechanisms and knowing how to reverse
the resistance hold the promise of providing insights that may lead
to improvements in the use of currently available anticancer
drugs.
Our laboratory is interested in the molecular and cellular
pharmacology of anticancer drugs, such as drug resistance
mechanisms and reversal of resistance study and new drug
development. A promise of our research program is that
progress in the chemotherapy of cancer will depend on rational
combination of agents that reduce the function of plasma membrane
transporters such as P-gp, ABCG2 and MRPs, and to enhance the
actions of cytotoxic drugs. In collaboration with many
researchers in USA, China, Japan, Australia and Egypt, studies in
our laboratory focus on screening and identifying new inhibitors of
ABC transporters by in vitro membrane vesicles transport assay
system and cell based assay systems. Another future research
direction is to study the role of MRP family on the detoxification
of chemicals using knock out mouse models.