“Cancer doesn’t allow for slow,” said Chad Pecot, MD, professor of medicine — and he doesn’t, either.
Pecot co-leads UNC Lineberger’s Cancer Therapeutics Research Program, aiming to get discoveries made at the cancer center laboratories into the clinic; sees patients at UNC Health and runs a research lab; is founder and chief scientific officer of the Chapel Hill biotech startup EnFuego Therapeutics; and directs the UNC RNA Discovery Center, where researchers collaborate to study ribonucleic acids (RNA) and their therapeutic potential.
“There are no RNA medicines approved for cancer treatment, partly because they’re extremely hard to deliver to tumors and also expensive to make,” Pecot said. “However, recently publishing several high-impact papers with newer RNA medicines is a sign that we’re on the right track, and it would not have been possible to engineer these molecules and get them to this point without the University Cancer Research Fund.”
One of these new medicines, EFTX-G12V, is undergoing toxicity studies needed for FDA approval. Pecot and Albert Bowers, PhD, professor of chemical biology and medicinal chemistry at UNC Eshelman, engineered this molecule to deliver therapeutic RNA interference into tumors to target a specific mutation of the KRAS oncogene, which is linked to about 25% of all cancers. They found that EFTX-G12V effectively deactivates KRAS G12V, a cancer-causing genetic mutation, to stop cancer growth while sparing non-mutated cells.
Pecot also created a molecule, called Chimera, that attacks cancer by simultaneously targeting KRAS and MYC, a difficult-to-drug protein. This innovative dual-targeting approach is a promising treatment strategy for multiple cancer mutations. “To my knowledge, the chimeric drug is the first tumor-directed, two-in-one oncology drug that can hit two different oncogenes at once,” Pecot said.
Although he is a pioneering physician-scientist today, Pecot initially had no interest in research; he thought it was slow and boring. He liked math and physics, and wanted to design things that could help people, so he studied biomedical engineering at the University of Miami.
His sophomore year, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He had surgery followed by months of chemotherapy; he was inspired by fellow patients to help people with cancer.
For his senior design project, Pecot created a medical device that could help treat cancer. But the PhD student he was paired with never tested the device, and the project stalled — feeding into Pecot’s beliefs about the drudgery of research.
Pecot then turned to a focus in oncology. He attended medical school at Miami and did his residency at Vanderbilt University, where he met researchers whose enthusiasm for their work made him start to rethink his anti-research views.
But it wasn’t until Pecot was an oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center that everything clicked. “I’m working at one of the best cancer centers, seeing cancer patients from all over the world, and we were telling so many people we had no options left for them,” he said. “I realized I couldn’t be in the clinic full time; there had to be something else I could do.”
Pecot gave research another try — and this time, it stuck. He spent three years training as a budding physician-scientist at MD Anderson and in 2013 was recruited to UNC Lineberger, where he thrives at the intersection of medicine, innovation and urgency.
“Once I finally got in the lab and realized that you could use your mind to help people, and that research can be exciting and move fast, I was hooked,” he said. “If you’re trying to make a difference in cancer, you can’t go slow.”