The promise of drugs that send proteins to the shredder

Paper shredder shredding a protein structure

Source: © Dan Bright

Andy Extance charts how research into revolutionary targeted protein degradation therapies is moving from serendipity to strategic discovery

Traditional small-molecule inhibitor drugs typically jam a protein’s function like a wrench in the gears. Chopping proteins involved in disease into confetti instead could enable treatments previous approaches could never achieve. Scientists have discovered more than 4000 disease-associated proteins, of which current therapies target around 400. The remainder often have difficult structures to target – but TPD drugs might be able to.