Ruben Kapur, PhD
Newswise — Pediatric leukemia affects approximately 4,000 children each year in the United States, and the incidence of the disease is steadily increasing year after year. Reuben Kapur, director of the Herman B Wells Center for Pediatric Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine, is working to discover new treatments that will improve patient care. He is seeking industry partners to take his research further.
To better understand the mechanisms behind difficult-to-treat pediatric leukemias such as acute myeloid leukemia and juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia, Kapur’s lab is studying how blood stem cells become altered as a result of acquiring mutations, a process which causes the cells to become leukemic.
“Both acute myeloid leukemia and juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia have a very high rate of relapse, and the only curative therapy is bone marrow transplantation,” said Kapur. “My goal is to create novel leukemia therapies to improve pediatric patient care.”
Stem cell transplantation is critical to the treatment of leukemic cancers. To enhance the clinical efficacy of that process, Kapur and his team have identified new drugs for improving the homing capabilities of hematopoietic cells.
During hematopoietic cell transplantations, patients are given high doses of either chemotherapy or radiation to kill cancerous cells. However, healthy stem cells in the bone marrow are often destroyed, and patients must replenish their healthy stem cells through transplantations. Unfortunately, the process of transplantation is highly inefficient because the migration of stem cells back to their home in bone marrow is low during these treatments.
To improve the process, Kapur transiently exposed stem cells from human cord blood to drugs and then washed off the drugs. This allowed him to transplant the cells which resulted in improved restoration of human blood system.
Nationally recognized for his work in pediatric blood cancers, Kapur is the Frieda and Albrecht Kipp Professor of Pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine with secondary appointments in the school’s departments of biochemistry and molecular biology, medical and molecular genetics, and microbiology and immunology. He also co-leads the Hematopoiesis and Hematologic Malignancies Program at the IU Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center.
In addition to his groundbreaking work on leukemia therapies, Kapur has also studied the treatment of ulcerative colitis induced changes in normal and pre-leukemic blood stem cells and how chronic conditions such as colitis contribute to rapid growth or pre-leukemic stem cells. His work, in collaboration with Mark Kelley, Betty and Earl Herr Professor of Pediatric Oncology Research at the IU School of Medicine, has identified a pathway and a therapy for reversing these changes in pre-leukemic stem cells. The drug has a profound impact on restoring the induced changes of ulcerative colitis in pre-clinical models of this disease with minimal side effects and low toxicity.
Kapur has a long-standing relationship with the IU Innovation and Commercialization Office. He has disclosed 14 inventions, and ICO has filed several patent applications to support his research.
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