Drew James Adams
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Pharmacology
T cells are immune cells that help clear infections, but they sometimes attack the body's own tissues or a transplanted organ. That misguided activation drives graft-versus-host disease, transplant rejection, rheumatoid arthritis and lung fibrosis.
- Fields
Pharmacology
Chemistry
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
T cell activation
Exportin-1
nuclear export
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- Determine why small molecules binding the same Cys528 site on Exportin-1 (XPO1), a nuclear transport protein, differ in their effects on nuclear export and cell survival, using structural and functional assays.
- Test whether XPO1 modulators block T-cell activation by detaching XPO1, NFAT transcription factors (switches for T-cell genes) and other chromatin factors from DNA.
- Optimize XPO1 partial antagonists through medicinal chemistry and evaluate leading compounds in human primary T cells and a mouse model of lung fibrosis.
- Provide assay development, high-throughput screening, and hit-to-lead cheminformatics and medicinal chemistry guidance through the Small Molecule Drug Development Shared Resource.
More about the research
Current drugs such as corticosteroids and cyclosporine dampen many kinds of immune cells at once, which causes severe side effects. A drug that blocks only harmful T-cell activation would be a major improvement. The lab's work combines a focused drug-discovery project on this problem with running a shared screening facility that helps other researchers find drug-like molecules.
Why it matters
Patients with graft-versus-host disease, transplant rejection, rheumatoid arthritis or lung fibrosis now depend on drugs that suppress the whole immune system. XPO1 partial antagonists that block only harmful T-cell activation, with low toxicity, could become a more selective treatment approach. This would extend XPO1-targeting drugs beyond late-stage cancer. The shared screening facility also helps cancer researchers find chemical probes to test new therapeutic ideas.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Robert Damoiseaux
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Pharmacology
Expand the facility's high-throughput screening capabilities with new approaches, building on six robotic systems that test more than 100,000 samples per day and on imaging readouts such as spinning-disk confocal microscopy.
Seiya Kitamura
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY·Chemistry
Couple the SuFEx click-chemistry high-throughput medicinal chemistry platform with covalent ligands, molecules that bond permanently to proteins, to develop chemical probes for individual underexplored proteins that lack distinct binding sites.
W Todd Lowther
Wake Forest University, NC·Biochemistry
Design and synthesize new compounds based on screening hits to explore the structure–activity relationships of hydroxyproline dehydrogenase (HYPDH) inhibitor scaffolds, improving potency, selectivity and drug-like properties.
The school
Case Western Reserve University: 34 labs on PI Pages, $643M a year on research, 213 research doctorates a year.
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