reNEW completes its first 30,000 compound screen, to find drugs to protect the heart

reNEW Melbourne researchers in the Heart Disease Team have now completed a screen of 30,000 drug compounds, towards the aim of developing transformative therapies for patients with heart failure.

Anthracycline-based chemotherapy successfully treats 80 percent of children with cancer. However, once cleared of cancer, the burden of the disease is not always eliminated. A common side-effect of this form of cancer treatment is heart failure. Childhood cancer survivors are 15 times more likely to develop heart failure and eight times more likely to have cardiovascular complications than the general population.

reNEW Principal Investigator Associate Professor David Elliott is compelled to change this. He has brought together an interdisciplinary disease team to focus on looking for new drugs that can protect the heart from these severe side-effects.

In collaboration with the MCRI Stafford Fox Drug Discovery Facility, led by Facility Manager Dr Alejandro Hidalgo, the team screened reNEW’s 30,000 compound library on human stem cell derived heart cells that had been exposed to Anthracyclines.

This screen identified more than 1000 compounds that can protect heart cells from Anthracycline mediated death. The next steps for this work will be to evaluate which of these are the most promising compounds for further drug development.

“We are excited to now advance these findings towards the goal of developing a first-in-class therapy for heart failure”, said reNEW Associate Investigator Dr Kevin Watt, who led the project.

The reNEW 30,000 Compound Library

In 2023, reNEW curated a 30,000 small molecule library specifically designed, manufactured, and banked for use within reSOLVE for drug development.

This library was specifically designed to include compounds with drug-like properties suitable for development and to limit false positives. The reNEW library is managed by Compounds Australia, a compound repository supported by the Australian Government as part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

“The reNEW library hosted by Compounds Australia is a unique resource for reNEW scientists, which will greatly enhance their ability to identify new drugs using the human disease models developed in reSOLVE and ultimately bring these as innovative therapies to the clinic,” reNEW Principal Investigator Professor Christine Mummery said.