1. Potent and preferential degradation of CDK6 via proteolysis targeting chimera degraders.
Su, S., Yang, Z., Gao, H., Yang, H., Zhu, S., An, Z., Wang, J., Li, Q., Chandarlapaty, S., Deng, H. and Wu, W., 2019. Journal of medicinal chemistry, 62(16), pp.7575-7582.
A focused PROTAC library hijacking cancer therapeutic target CDK6 was developed. A design principle as "match/mismatch" was proposed for understanding the degradation profile differences in these PROTACs. Notably, potent PROTACs with specific and remarkable CDK6 degradation potential were generated by linking CDK6 inhibitor palbociclib and E3 ligase CRBN recruiter pomalidomide. The PROTAC strongly inhibited proliferation of hematopoietic cancer cells including multiple myeloma and robustly degraded copy-amplified/mutated forms of CDK6, indicating future potential clinical applications.
2. Homolog-Selective Degradation as a Strategy to Probe the Function of CDK6 in AML.
Brand, M., Jiang, B., Bauer, S., Donovan, K.A., Liang, Y., Wang, E.S., Nowak, R.P., Yuan, J.C., Zhang, T., Kwiatkowski, N. and Müller, A.C., 2019. Cell chemical biology, 26(2), pp.300-306.
The design of selective small molecules is often stymied by similar ligand binding pockets. Here, we report BSJ-03-123, a phthalimide-based degrader that exploits protein-interface determinants to achieve proteome-wide selectivity for the degradation of cyclin-dependent kinase 6 (CDK6). Pharmacologic CDK6 degradation targets a selective dependency of acute myeloid leukemia cells, and transcriptomics and phosphoproteomics profiling of acute degradation of CDK6 enabled dynamic mapping of its immediate role in coordinating signaling and transcription.