Repurposing Drugs for Osteosarcoma

Osteosarcoma Webinar Series: Osteosarcoma Webinar Series: One of our MIB Agents OutSmarting Osteosarcoma 2024 grant recipients, Dr. Shahana Mahajan, a Professor and Principal Investigator from Hunter College of the City University of New York will provide an overview of her funded work on repurposing drugs for metastatic osteosarcoma. Dr. Mahajan will share the recent findings from her lab on testing the efficacy of Riluzole in osteosarcoma cell lines and patient-derived cell lines. Riluzole is a glutamate-release inhibitor and has been used for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) for decades and is being tested for other neurodegenerative disorders. Riluzole has shown promising results in glutamate receptor-expressing melanoma and other cancer types. The Mahajan Lab efforts are invested in establishing Riluzole as a possible treatment option for osteosarcoma for which targeted therapy has not been successful due to lack of oncogenic driver mutations. In their lab, Riluzole has shown efficacy in inhibiting proliferation, migration, and invasive ability of osteosarcoma cells in 11 cell lines and 4 patient-derived lines. Dr. Mahajan earned a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, a premier Institute in India in the field of Molecular Biology. She did postdoctoral studies at Weill Cornell Medical College in the Department of Pharmacology and at NYU Langone Medical Center in the Department of Biochemistry. She continued her research at NYU Langone Medical Center as a Research Assistant Professor until she joined Hunter College as an Assistant Professor in 2007. At Hunter, she continued her research neuroscience to investigate glutamate-induced excitotoxicity in rat hippocampal neurons. After her lab was lost to Hurricane Sandy, she reinitiated her research in osteosarcoma. In 2015, her lab moved to Belfer Research Building which is a part of Weill Cornell Medical College. She was appointed as an adjunct faculty at Weill Cornell Medical College. After a short presentation on this research, she will take questions from attendees. Share your questions in advance with us at [email protected].