Pinpointing How New Drugs Exert Beneficial Effects
Wed, 07/06/2016 - 8:22amby Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
A collaborative effort by cancer researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and chemists at Boehringer Ingelheim (BI), a pharmaceutical firm, has resulted in the identification of a new drug target in leukemia and creation of a candidate drug that hits the target. Perhaps even more important, the research demonstrates a new, highly accurate way of proving how this and certain other classes of drugs work -- extremely valuable information in the risky business of drug development. The research appears today in Nature Chemical Biology.
The cancer in question is a particularly aggressive form of blood cancer called acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, which is often fatal. The newly identified target is a binding pocket on a protein called BRD9. The drug designed by BI to bind at that pocket, called a bromodomain, is provisionally called BI-7273.
The team of academic and industry scientists, led by Associate Professor Christopher Vakoc of CSHL in coordination with Dr. Manfred Koegl of BI, identified BRD9 in screens, then demonstrated its importance in human AML cells grown in culture and in rodent models of AML.
Like nearly all proteins, BRD9 is subdivided into sections called domains, each of which has a specific function. Each domain is encoded by a portion of the BRD9 gene. The domain of interest to Dr. Anja Hohmann, first author of the new paper who performed the research while still a graduate student in Vakoc's lab, was BRD9's bromodomain, the subunit of the protein that "reads" chromatin, a bundled form of the cell's genetic material.
[Full article...] dddmag.com |
