Jan Stenvang

Short presentation

I have a background in molecular biology and biochemistry in cancer research with a focus on colorectal and breast cancer. I have worked both at the Danish Cancer Society, at University of Copenhagen and in a biotech company.

During the past 15 years I have obtained expert knowledge in basic research and translational science within resistance model systems in cancer. Especially, I have worked in translational cancer research on drug resistance, biomarkers and small investigator initiated clinical trials.

Through many projects and various academic and industrial collaborations I have contributed to improved basic insight into cancer resistance mechanisms, initiation of clinical trials and development of new products for several companies. Thereby, I have established personal relations and scientific collaborations to world leading experts in cancer related resistance and biomarker research, bioinformatics and systems biology and basic and clinical cancer research.

In the laboratory, we have established a research platform of drug sensitive and drug resistant cancer cell lines.

Briefly, the usage of this platform may be exemplified by the following:

- Discovery of putative predictive biomarkers for response to the chemotherapeutic drug irinotecan in colorectal cancer patients and validation of antibodies and scoring protocols to further investigate the value of these biomarkers. We already have evidence that one of these biomarkers can predict significantly higher likelihood for obtaining objective response to irinotecan. These data are submitted for publication.

- We have conducted re-purposing studies in our resistant cancer cell lines. We have focused on antihistamines, disulfiram and ion channel modulators. They have all shown promising abilities to act in synergy with chemotherapy. Since these drugs are all safe, already on the market and have been tested in clinical trials we are currently planning clinical trials for each of these drug classes. Data on antihistamines have been submitted for publication and abstracts for disulfiram and ion channel modulators are submitted to the ASCO-2016 conference.

- Novel chemical entities may be potent drugs to overcome resistance. We have analyzed colorectal and breast cancer cells with resistance to the topoisomerase-I inhibitor irinotecan (SN-38). LMP-400 is a drug that also targets topoisomerase-I but by different mechanisms that irinotecan. We showed that the drug LMP-400 is still active in these cells. LMP-400 is currently in clinical trials with cancer patients and we are planning a clinical trial with LMP-400 in irinotecan refractory colorectal cancer patients. The data on breast cancer is published and the work on colorectal cancer is in review.

- Clinical trials are ongoing partly based on our research. I have contributed to two clinical Phase II trials and I am actively involved in these. These studies are in colorectal cancer and breast cancer. Both of them are re-purposing of anti-cancer drugs guided by predictive biomarkers (EudraCT No. 2012-002348-26, 2013-001648-79).