Accelerating next-generation drug discovery with click-based construction of PROTACs
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 8-Jun-2026 02:16 ET (8-Jun-2026 06:16 GMT/UTC)
Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) are molecules that can eliminate disease-causing proteins, but developing them is often slow and complex, limiting how quickly new candidates can be tested. Now, researchers from Tokyo University of Science have developed a three-step "click chemistry" assembly line that rapidly builds functional PROTACs from simple building blocks. The resulting molecules successfully degraded a target protein in cells, paving the way for faster, more flexible development of protein-targeting therapeutics.
Kyoto, Japan -- Colorectal cancer, or CRC, is the world's second most lethal cancer based on the number of deaths, and is the third most prevalent malignant tumor. Doctors and patients have long been hoping for better diagnostics for prognosis, such as molecular subtyping, which uses data collected from cancer stem cells, or tumor-initiating cells, to further divide one type of cancer into subgroups. It may correlate with patient outcomes and enable better prognoses.
Though many CRC tissue samples have been analyzed and classified based on mRNA gene expression, currently the practical application of these studies in patient prognosis is limited for colorectal cancer. This motivated a team of researchers from Kyoto University to examine cancer stem cells for the molecular subtyping of CRC.
"We need more comprehensive and clinically useful markers and their signatures to help predict the outcome of each patient," says first author Fumihiko Kakizaki.
University of Vermont scientists developed a first-of-its-kind study that tracks thousands of generations of digital organisms replaying evolution hundreds of times. Their results were surprising. In some cases, changing the environment helped populations find higher fitness peaks; in others, it hindered them. This gives a bird’s-eye view of how evolution played out across many different environments—something that would be impossible to test in the lab. The biggest takeaway is that starting point really matters. A population’s history shapes how high it can climb and how hard the path is to get there, which means one population may not represents an entire species.
The genome differs from person to person in thousands of positions. In some cases, this means that proteins have a different building block in certain regions, rendering some antibody-based therapies ineffective, report researchers from the University of Basel, Switzerland.