Kate Amato Foundation Awarded Projects
Advancing P27600: A Novel Plant-Derived Compound for Treating Ewing Sarcoma
Project Goal: The long-term goal is to create a safe and effective new drug that will offer hope to children battling resistant Ewing sarcoma.
Institution: Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital
Researchers: Debananda Pati, PhD
Year Awarded: 2025
Type of Childhood Cancer: Ewing sarcoma
Project Description:
Ewing sarcoma is a rare and aggressive form of bone cancer that primarily affects children and adolescents. In the United Sates, the annual incidence of Ewing sarcoma is 2.93 children per 1,000,000. Approximately 200-250 children and adolescents in the U.S. are diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma each year. Current treatments are often harsh, outdated, and not always effective, especially for patients whose cancer has come back or spread. In fact, no new drugs have been approved specifically for Ewing sarcoma since 1964, and the survival rate for patients with relapsed or advanced disease remains alarmingly low. One of the major challenges in treating Ewing sarcoma is drug resistance—many tumors stop responding to standard therapies. Another is metastasis, where the cancer spreads to other parts of the body. Because this cancer is so rare, there has been limited research and little pharmaceutical investment in finding new treatments. With support from the Kate Amato Foundation in 2022, our team screened a large library of natural substances and existing medicines to identify new compounds that might help treat Ewing sarcoma. Among them, we discovered a promising natural compound derived from a plant, called P27600, that showed encouraging anti-cancer activity in laboratory tests.
We are now seeking renewed support from the Foundation to continue this vital work. Our next steps focus on generating critical new data: synthesizing P27600 in the laboratory, evaluating its safety, and testing its ability to slow or stop tumor growth in animal models of Ewing sarcoma. These studies are essential to strengthen our case for securing larger-scale funding from the NIH and Department of Defense to advance P27600 toward clinical development as a potential treatment. Our long-term goal is to create a safe and effective new drug that could offer hope to children battling resistant Ewing sarcoma. By following FDA guidelines, we aim to eventually bring this compound to clinical trials and, one day, to patients who urgently need better treatment options.
