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New therapeutics that harness cellular machinery to degrade targets are entering clinical trials, led by a PROTAC anticancer candidate developed by Arvinas.
As soon as Ian Taylor read a story in his local newspaper about how a young biotech firm was focused on developing targeted protein degraders, he was hooked. Whereas most small molecules inhibit a protein's activity by blocking its active site, the company Arvinas was on the hunt for small molecules dubbed ‘PROTACs’ that could co-opt the cell’s degradation machinery to break the proteins down entirely. “I remember thinking to myself: wow, that would be awesome. You could really hit undruggable targets with this,” recalls Taylor, who was then at Pfizer Oncology. Now he is overseeing the first clinical test for this emergent modality as senior vice president of biology at Arvinas.