Back

PSMA-Guided PROTAC Degraders for Tumor-Specific Protein Degradation in Prostate Cancer

Meng, X.; Hu, X.; Zhang, S.; Zhang, S.; Wang, X.; Ma, S.; Qin, C.

2024-04-26 cancer biology
10.1101/2024.04.25.591100 bioRxiv
Show abstract

PROTACs, degrading target protein to treat diseases, represent a highly promising drug design strategy. However, the degradation of target proteins by PROTACs in non-disease tissues may lead to systemic toxicity. Herein, capitalizing on the characteristic overexpression of PSMA in prostate cancer tumor tissues, we devised a PSMA-guided PROTACs specific targeting to prostate cancer. By conjugating AR degraders and BET degraders separately with PSMA ligands via cleavable linkers, two classes of PSMA-guided PROTACs were obtained. In vitro experiments demonstrated that PSMA-guided PROTAC molecules selectively degraded target proteins in PSMA-overexpressing prostate cancer cells, without affecting target proteins in non-PSMA-overexpressing cells. In vivo studies revealed that compared to conventional PROTACs, PSMA-guided PROTACs enhanced drug exposure in prostate cancer tumor tissues, prolonged half-life, and consequently achieved stronger and more sustained therapeutic effects. The PSMA-guided PROTAC strategy provides a novel avenue for disease tissue-specific PROTAC research, holding significant implications for targeted therapy in prostate cancer.

Matching journals

The top 17 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.