Inspired by new advances in peptide-delivered medications, the Raman Lab is exploring peptides’ potential to disrupt certain cancers. The work is supported by an award from The Badger Challenge.
The Badger Challenge, an annual fundraising race held each fall, was established in 2016 to support ground-breaking investigations in cancer research at UW–Madison. The Raman Lab’s 2025 Badger Challenge Award will support preliminary research by two doctoral students in the lab, Keelin Reilly and Saylor Strugar.
Over the past decade, new peptide drugs such as Ozempic have demonstrated stable formulations of peptide-based drugs and opened doors for researchers to explore their untapped potential as pharmaceuticals. Now, biochemistry professor Vatsan Raman and his lab are investigating whether peptide-derived treatments can be used to disrupt oncogenic interactions inside cells. They hope to target interactions associated with neck, colorectal, and lung cancers currently lacking FDA-approved therapeutics treatments.
“These misbehaving protein-protein interactions are a problem. They can lead to unwanted signal or create all sorts of other problems in a cell. There are dozens of protein-protein interactions directly linked to cancers. We wanted to come up with a method by which we could design peptide-based drugs to disrupt unwanted protein-protein interactions,” says Raman.
Reilly and Strugar are modifying cells to produce a specific RNA transcript in response to unwanted, oncogenic protein-protein interactions. They will then measure the amount of transcript produced in the presence of given peptides: high amounts of transcript suggest that the protein-protein interaction is unchanged; low amounts of transcript mean that a peptide successfully inhibits the interaction. The researchers will screen hundreds of thousands of peptides at once to quickly narrow down peptide candidates that could disrupt protein-protein interactions known to cause cancer.
“We are so grateful to receive the Badger Challenge Award. This funding allows us to dive deeper into developing peptide therapeutic screening strategies and expand the scope of our work. We are excited to extend the reach of our research with support of the Badger Challenge,” says Strugar.
“I heard about the grant by chance through an email announcement from the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and immediately recognized that it could be just the opportunity we needed to get our idea off the ground,” Reilly adds. “The Badger Challenge is a testament to how dedicated the UW–Madison community is to fighting and curing cancer through cutting-edge research, and I am so excited to be a part of that.”
Written by Renata Solan.