KANİLTEK (Cancer Drug Technologies) project has been established by a three year long support from DPT (Governmental Planning Organization). The Project was proposed by Bilkent University in collaboration with Hacettepe University, Koç University and Middle East Technical University.

The subject of KANİLTEK project is discovery of new anti-cancer drug candidates and development of these until preclinical phase studies. The project aims at gene-targeted anti-cancer drug development such that the treatment potentials of natural plant chemicals, synthetic chemicals, recombinant proteins, monoclonal antibodies and siRNA-lentiviruses will be assessed in their effect on selected target proteins and genes that are known to be abnormally activated or overexpressed in cancer. In recent years, this type of target-driven drugs has become the driving force of modern biotechnology based drug industry. The annual sales of such a drug is around a billion dollars. Consequently, the market values of biotechnology product molecules of high potential that are in preclinical phase studies currently remain high. Due to these reasons and considering the country advantages, a large scope project aiming at new drug discovery has been proposed.

The main objectives of KANİLTEK Project are as follows:

• Establishment of an anti-cancer bioactivity screening center,

• Establishment of a plant-originated and synthetic active compound bank,

• Development of in silico drug screening technologies,

• Development of target driven new anti-cancer drug candidates.

The project’s aims of establishing a bioactivity screening center and a molecule bank will open a new dimension in the drug discovery studies in our country. The molecule bank will function continually, and the collected molecules will be open to use in all drug screening studies giving them both an economic and a scientific value. The bioactivity screening center will contribute to the commercialization of drug active compound studies conducted in our country. In silico drug screening technologies are a must for our country since they are less expensive, faster than and require less effort to obtain results than laboratory experiments. The development of these technologies has its commercial and scientific value not only in discovery of new drug candidates, but in obtaining of genuine screening technologies.

The project’s final target is the discovery of new drug candidates that are of commercial value. The new products that will be the outcome of the project alone have an economic value. In other countries, there are many successful academical units and biotechnology firms that find new drug candidates and market these to major drug firms. The income of such organizations is the sum of their earnings from patent rights and licensing of the developed products and processes.

KANİLTEK project will be carried out by application of both classical approaches proven to be successful such as bioactivity screening, plant-originated and synthetic active compound identification, and, modern approaches such as in silico and tissue culture inhibitor studies against genuine target proteins that are abnormally activated in cancer, in a multidisciplinary and intercollegiate system.

In the final part of the project, genetically modified and “nude” mouse models will be employed to characterize the anti-tumor molecules preclinically. After reservation of patent rights for the molecules, the outcomes of the project will be published in scientific journals, be presented in international meetings and be converted to economic value via pharmaceutical firms.

In addition, 15 postgraduate students and 5 research assistants that have specialized in molecular life sciences field will be trained in the scope of KANİLTEK project.