Many cancer drugs work by inhibiting the activity of proteins — the molecules that do most of the work in the cell.
But some misbehaving proteins that turn normal cells cancerous are difficult to inhibit, and even effective inhibitors lose their potency when cancer finds a workaround and becomes resistant to those drugs.
A new approach now in clinical trials called targeted protein degradation works a different way.
Instead of inhibiting the troublemakers, these new therapies trick the cell’s natural garbage collectors into grabbing cancer-causing proteins and hauling them out with the rest of the molecular trash.
In a study published late last month in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Fred Hutch Cancer Center cancer chemical biologist Behnam Nabet, PhD and his collaborators describe how they used this approach in mice to rapidly destroy lung and pancreas tumors caused by a variant of a commonly mutated, cancer-driving gene.
