Frontiers in Pharmacology (May 2021)

PROTAC: An Effective Targeted Protein Degradation Strategy for Cancer Therapy

  • Si-Min Qi,
  • Jinyun Dong,
  • Zhi-Yuan Xu,
  • Xiang-Dong Cheng,
  • Wei-Dong Zhang,
  • Jiang-Jiang Qin,
  • Jiang-Jiang Qin

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2021.692574
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12

Abstract

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Proteolysis targeting chimeric (PROTAC) technology is an effective endogenous protein degradation tool developed in recent years that can ubiquitinate the target proteins through the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) to achieve an effect on tumor growth. A number of literature studies on PROTAC technology have proved an insight into the feasibility of PROTAC technology to degrade target proteins. Additionally, the first oral PROTACs (ARV-110 and ARV-471) have shown encouraging results in clinical trials for prostate and breast cancer treatment, which inspires a greater enthusiasm for PROTAC research. Here we focus on the structures and mechanisms of PROTACs and describe several classes of effective PROTAC degraders based on E3 ligases.

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