The main interest of the Feisk lab has long been cancer drug discovery. The cancer drug targets that they are pursuing include highly validated but technically challenging such as KRAS, MYC, Wnt, and Mcl-1.
The focus of our lab is on cancer drug discovery using fragment-based approaches and structure-based design. To accomplish this goal, we have assembled a multidisciplinary team that includes structural biologists, medicinal chemists, and cell biologists. Among them are five research professors and several research assistants, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. In our lab, we clone, express, and purify proteins, conduct fragment-based screens, determine the three-dimensional structures of protein/ligand complexes using NMR and/or X-ray crystallography, design and synthesize compounds, and test compounds in primary and secondary biological assays. The cancer drug targets that we are pursuing are highly validated but technically challenging such as K-Ras and c-Myc.