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Protein-slayer drugs could beat some of the cruellest cancers
Momentum is building for PROTAC treatments that eliminate disease-causing proteins, including those responsible for difficult-to-treat childhood cancers.
The first working PROTAC was demonstrated in 2001, when Craig Crews, a chemical biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, biochemist Raymond Deshaies, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and their colleagues constructed one that degraded its target protein in cell fluid from frog eggs 2. The work expanded in 2024, when a team Mossé assembled along with biochemist Martin Eilers at the University of Würzburg in Germany won a large grant from Cancer Grand Challenges, a global non-profit initiative looking to tackle childhood solid tumours. “For paediatric-only cancers, the market is so small it doesn’t fit the commercialization plan of a traditional pharma company,” says Catherine Bollard, co-leader of the cell-therapy team and a paediatric haematologist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC.
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