Katherine Donovan, a lead scientist in Eric Fischer’s lab at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is working on a new type of cancer treatment. It involves protein degraders, and it could change the treatment of the disease as we know it.
Much like it sounds, degraders are molecules that “hijack the cell’s degradation system that is basically like the cell’s trashcan” and tell it to remove disease-causing proteins. These are different from classical targeted cancer treatments and have promising potential advantages, Donovan told Boston.com.
“Classically, what we would do is we would find a drug that binds to [a problematic protein] and stops it from doing its activity. A lot of the problem with that is you need to maintain a constant high level of drug to constantly inhibit that protein’s activity,” Donovan said.
