My full name is Phan Duy Nguyen. In 2019, I joined the Graduate School of Medicine and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Toyama, Japan as a PhD student. I am doing my research under the co-supervision of Professor Tsutomu Fujii, Department of Surgery and Science, and Associate Professor Suresh Awale, Natural Drug Discovery Laboratory. My research is focused on targeting a unique phenomenon in pancreatic cancer cells, called the austerity phenomenon, aiming for the discovery of a next-generation of anticancer agents selectively targeting pancreatic cancer cells without any noticeable toxicity on normal cells.
First let me give a synopsis about the core idea of my research. Pancreatic tumors are hypovascular in nature, resulting in an inadequate supply of nutrients and oxygen to the aggressively proliferating cancer cells. However, pancreatic cancer cells show an extraordinary tolerance to starvation, enabling them to survive under hypovascular (austere) conditions. Thus, the discovery of compounds able to eliminate this tolerance to nutrient deprivation is a novel strategy in the anticancer drug discovery (the antiausterity strategy). Adopting this screening strategy, compounds are tested for their cytotoxic effects on pancreatic cancer cell lines (e.g. PANC-1 cells) under both nutrient-deprived (NDM) and nutrient-rich (DMEM) conditions. Compounds exerting cytotoxic effects only under NDM without considerable effect under DMEM are deemed antiausterity agents
My expected date of graduation is March 2023. After graduation, I plan to continue my postdoctoral training at University of Toyama. Hopefully, I plan to focus during my postdoctoral study on focusing on the effects of our investigated compounds on the metabolome and genome of pancreatic cancer cells