Searching for new ways to block the growth of cancer cells is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Tumor cells rely on thousands of proteins to function, but only a few of those proteins can be precisely targeted by drugs to treat cancer safely and effectively. Now, a team at Scripps Research and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT has spearheaded a new method to home in on new drug targets most likely to impact multiple cancers.
The research, published in Nature Chemical Biology on October 2, 2023, used a precise gene editing approach to alter more than 13,000 possible drug targets and determine which edits affected cell growth. Integrating these data with chemical proteomic information pointed toward hundreds of possible drug targets,