Researchers at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute and the Mayo Clinic have discovered a way to supercharge molecular cancer treatments to destroy more cancer-causing proteins in cells.
The research findings of UAMS’ Hong-yu Li, the Helen Adams and Arkansas Research Alliance Endowed Chair in Drug Discovery and professor of medicinal chemistry and chemical biology in the UAMS College of Pharmacy, and Haojie Huang, the Gordon H. and Violet Partels professor of cellular biology at the Mayo Clinic, were published in Advanced Science.
Li and Huang’s research gives drug makers a new tool for enhancing molecular cancer treatment therapy with Proteolysis Targeting Chimeras technology. PROTACs are genetically engineered molecular compounds that bridge cancer-causing proteins with the molecules that seek to destroy them.
The team found that adding an “oglio,” or oligonucleotide, to the PROTAC molecular compound helped degrade the targeted proteins completely, improving on conventional PROTACs.
