'Death Star': Breaking down huge barriers in cancer treatment

According to SciTech Daily , a group of scientists from the Center for Genomic Regulation (Spain) and the Wellcome Sanger Institute (UK) have comprehensively identified the "weak" positions found in the KRAS protein , which will open path to the development of new cancer drugs.

KRAS is a key target in cancer treatment - (Photo: SCITECH DAILY).

The article published in the scientific journal Nature said that KRAS is a major target in cancer treatment because it is one of the most frequently mutated genes in many types of cancer.

It is found in 10% of human cancers, more commonly in the deadliest cancers such as pancreatic or lung cancer. It's called the "death star" protein because of its strange shape and complete lack of a suitable site for a drug to target.

Therefore, when identified in 1982, KRAS was always considered "indestructible".

The key to controlling KRAS is to control allosteric sites on it. These are regulatory sites that can induce change when associated with other agents. But there's a big challenge: These positions are difficult to grasp, causing scientists to "lose direction" when developing drugs.

Those are the dangerous locations that a group of Spanish and British scientists have just successfully mapped, breaking the final barrier.

To do that, they used a technique called "deep mutation scanning ," which created more than 26,000 variations of the KRAS protein, changing only 1-2 amino acids at a time.

Through a complex review and comparison process with the application of artificial intelligence (AI), "strategic" positions have been identified.

"The big challenge in medicine is not knowing which proteins cause disease and not knowing how to control them. Our research represents a new strategy to target these proteins and speed up the development of drugs to control their activities" - said Prof. Dr. Ben Lehner, lead author.