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What’s next for the synthetic lethality drug discovery engine?
As a surge of cancer drugs with new synthetic lethality targets enter the clinic, the opportunities and challenges of the underlying discovery strategies are coming into focus.
Drug developers are always on the lookout for the next generation of cancer targets. The low-hanging fruits have been picked. Known higher-hanging targets — including a long list of tumour suppressor genes that are frequently neutralized by loss-of-function mutations — remain out of reach. After all, how do you drug a mutated protein that is no longer working, or in some cases not being produced at all?