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Drug discovery

Fresh target for cancer therapy

Nature volume 458, pages 709–710 (2009)Cite this article

The Byzantine system for degrading proteins inside cells is already the target of a successful anticancer drug. A compound that inhibits another part of this system also shows promise in models of cancer in mice.

Drug discovery is hard. Even harder is drug discovery aimed at biological systems that haven't previously been tested as therapeutic targets. The extraordinary challenge is brought home with sobering clarity by numbers: in 2008, only one new compound was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating cancer. In the same year, the US pharmaceutical industry alone spent about $65 billion in the pursuit of new medicines1, much of which went towards anticancer research — so the apparently slow progress in discovering new cancer medicines is certainly not due to lack of investment.

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Figure 1: Activation of CRL enzymes by the NEDD8 protein.
Figure 2: Structure of an NAE inhibitor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Raymond J. Deshaies is in the Division of Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, California 91125, USA. deshaies@its.caltech.edu,

    Raymond J. Deshaies

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  1. Raymond J. Deshaies
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Deshaies, R. Fresh target for cancer therapy. Nature 458, 709–710 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/458709a

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