RE: Did We Find A Cure Against Cancer? The Promise of PROTACs

[carlgbush]

Hi there, this is an interesting post. Can you elaborate a little bit on how you think these factors could be used to fight cancer ?
While some cancer cells produce unique proteins (neoantigens) or normal proteins in abnormal quantities, how do you think degrading these proteins could kill the cancer cell ? (if we consider that most of proteins mutated in cancer are not essential for the survival of the cell because of the selection pressure)
This could also be very useful to fight prion diseases by promoting the degradation of abnormally folded proteins.

Comments

[lesshorrible]

Hey @carlgbush! Thank you for your very thoughtful post and great questions. The current approach is to target receptors that are expressed in cancer cells. Here is a quote from an article:

Few therapeutic options exist to treat CRPC, especially CRPC tumors expressing constitutively active androgen receptor (AR) splice variants that lack the ligand-binding domain and can effect androgen-independent transactivation of target genes. Importantly, we demonstrate that targeted degradation of BET proteins using proteolysis-targeting chimera (PROTAC) technology causes cell death in cultured prostate cancer cells and results in tumor growth inhibition or regression in mouse models of CRPC, including models that express high levels of AR splice variant 7

I will also leave the link to this article in this post. http://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7124.short
So it seems like you attack receptors that control transcription and thus, prevent the tumor from growing. Again, this research is still in its early stages. I tried to highlight its potential. I hope this answers your questions, otherwise let me know and I will go back and look for more studies. Cheers!

[carlgbush]

Thank your for the explanation and the link, that seems indeed promising for this type of cancer.
Cheers!