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Image credit:Dilok Klaisataporn, iStock.

Proteins are essential components of living matter – they function as building blocks for cells and tissues, as well as participate in signaling and practically all biochemical activities. However, each protein operates correctly only for a limited amount of time and is eliminated by molecular machinery after it has reached its “functional shelflife”. To maintain a healthy and functional proteome, cells tightly control protein turnover processes, ensuring that misfolded, damaged, and old proteins exit the game in a timely manner. This sophisticated mechanism of degradation was recently hijacked by the drug discovery industry to develop new small molecule therapies — protein degraders.

Three months of the full-scale ruzzian invasion are over however it’s still really heartwarming for as at Enamine to get more and more words and signs of support from our customers and partners. The recent example is our joint letter to Science journal initiated by our friends from UCSF John J. Irwin and Brian K. Shoichet.

(This post originally appeared on LinkedIn)

Notoriously toxic, covalent inhibitors have been nearly excluded from major drug discovery programs in the not so distant past. Ironically, a great amount of the important drugs exploit covalent inhibition as their mechanism of action (MOA). The view on covalent inhibitors is shifting towards a wider consideration, however, inspired by recent successes with EGFR inhibitors for treating cancer and many other promising examples. A recent publication in Nature provides a chemical proteomic platform for the global and quantitative analysis of lysine residues in native biological systems, offering further insights and ideas in this area.