The Weichert Laboratory
Faculty > Jamey Weichert
Jamey Weichert
Associate Professor, Surgery
Organ System/Disease Focus:Cancer Stem Cells
Aligned Research Focus: Detection and treatment of cancer stem cells.
Research Description
Although I have spent 25 years in the design and development
of targeted imaging and contrast agents, recently I have begun
to include cancer stem cells as target cells for imaging and therapy. We have recently shown with John Kuo that one of our agents, NM404, can selectively localize in stem cell-derived human glioma tumors in immune compromised mice. Since this agent has shown striking preclinical tumor targeting as well as radiotherapeutic tumor growth and survival efficacy in over 50 solid tumor models, we are now focused on evaluating the diagnostic and therapeutic effect of this agent in stem cell derived cancer models. We are initiating both in vitro confocal microscopy studies as well as in vivo imaging and therapy studies in mouse models with this agent which recently entered clinical phase 1 therapy trials. Due to its natural phospholipid structure, NM 404 may be able to penetrate cancer stem cells unlike the majority of classical pathway specific anticancer chemotherapeutics and thus offer the potential to have a direct effect on these extremely tumorigenic cells.