Molecular structures based on the organic substance glutarimide can suppress bone marrow cancer without side effects. This was reported by the press service of the RNF.
Despite the emergence of new treatments, cancer remains one of humanity’s most serious diseases. One of the most promising methods of cancer treatment is the removal of proteins necessary for growth and reproduction from cancer cells. To do this, these proteins need to be embedded in special destructive complexes – proteasomes – with the help of “lethal” molecules. Proteasomes are found in all animal cells where they serve to remove defective proteins. Ubiquitinase enzymes, one of which is Cereblon, are used to transport the defective proteins there. You can get Cereblon to tag the proteins of cancer cells, and then the body itself sends them to be destroyed. But modern preparations using this method are toxic because of the substance that binds this enzyme.
st. Petersburg State University and colleagues from other institutes proposed synthesizing molecules for the breakdown of tumors and other proteins, based on glutarimide, an organic nitrogen-containing compound that easily binds to the Cereblon protein and has no toxic effect. Based on this, the authors obtained 20 complex molecules that differ in small functional groups that give the substance a certain charge. Among them, sulfur-containing compounds turned out to have the highest affinity for the Cereblon protein: they bind to the “lethal” protein twice as efficiently as existing analogues.
The authors then treated cultures of myeloma cells, a bone marrow cancer, with the best “candidate” substances. The experiment showed that sulfur-containing compounds based on glutarimide suppress their cleavage. This confirms that these molecules can be used in the development of new types of chimeric drugs to degrade almost any protein without causing a toxic effect.
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