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Drug discovery

Propping up a destructive regime

Nature volume 461, pages 599–600 (2009)Cite this article

The Wnt signalling pathway balances the opposing activities of two proteins to transmit signals within cells. An inhibitor that stabilizes one of these proteins reveals a new target for anticancer drug development.

Cancer is often caused by unwanted activation of the Wnt signalling pathway, a group of proteins that work together to transmit signals from the outside of a cell to its nucleus. This is especially true in the colon, where mutations in a Wnt-pathway component called APC (adenomatous polyposis coli) activate signalling and are associated with the majority of colon cancers1. Compounds that prevent Wnt signals from reaching the cell nucleus are therefore attractive candidates for treating colon cancer and other Wnt-dependent cancers.

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Figure 1: The Wnt-signalling seesaw.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Randall T. Peterson is at the Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, USA, and at the Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts. peterson@cvrc.mgh.harvard.edu ,

    Randall T. Peterson

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  1. Randall T. Peterson
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Peterson, R. Propping up a destructive regime. Nature 461, 599–600 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/461599a

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