As targeted therapies get ever more precise, Deerfield unveils $50M bet on a Harvard professor's chemistry insights
Behind the seemingly simple concept of targeted cancer therapies is the drug developer’s headache that the target is always changing. Each generation of kinase inhibitors may be ostensibly hitting the same oncogene, but in addition to blocking the wildtype oncogene, they must now also address the mutations that have developed along the way, spurring resistance to current drugs.
The more those target kinases evolve, too, the more they could resemble off-target kinases you don’t want to bind. So each iteration requires more selectivity — sometimes down to differences of a few atoms.
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