Discovery Boosts Potential of New Cancer-Fighting Drugs

Scientists at Scripps Research have uncovered a critical feature that a promising new class of cancer drugs, known as CELMoDs, needs to be effective. CELMoDs are designed to attack cancer in a novel way, by binding to a regulatory protein called cereblon, which then triggers the degradation of key cancer-driving proteins. “Companies have been developing cereblon-binding protein-degradation drugs that they can see are better degraders, but they didn’t know this was because the drugs are better at driving this closed conformation,” Watson says .