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BCKDK: an emerging kinase target for metabolic diseases and cancer

  1. Michael P. East

    1. Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

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  2. Tuomo Laitinen

    1. School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland.

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  3. Christopher R. M. Asquith

    1. Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

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The understudied kinase branched-chain ketoacid dehydrogenase kinase (BCKDK) has recently been implicated in various human diseases. In addition to its established role in regulating the catabolic flux of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), BCKDK was also found to enhance MEK/ERK signalling, a key pathway driving cell growth and proliferation in cancer. So, BCKDK has become an attractive therapeutic target for BCAA-associated diseases and cancers.

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Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 20, 498 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41573-021-00107-6

Acknowledgements

This article is part of a series from the NIH Common Fund Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) program. The goal of IDG is to catalyse research on understudied proteins from druggable gene families by providing reagents, phenotypes and a mineable database; focusing on GPCRs, kinases and ion channels. For more information, see https://druggablegenome.net/

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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