Some nice work from Ethan Toriki, James Papatzimas, Daniel Nomura and coauthors on bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.04.512693v1
I think this is the first example in the “glue degraders” field where someone found a “degrading handle” that could be attached to multiple different inhibitors to give degradation of different proteins. A nice step forward in the rational design of molecular glue degraders!
#SciComm friendly version
Most drugs work by sticking to a protein and blocking its function. Often, part of the drug protrudes out onto the protein surface.
Recently it’s been found that this sometimes causes the protein to be recognised by the cell’s garbage disposal system, meaning the protein is deleted.
In this paper by Nomura they find a “tag” that can be added to different drugs, causing protein deletion.
Finding general tags like this will let us use this approach more broadly!
Chembellenie
opentika