Previously Failed Cancer Drug Repurposed to Act as ‘Flag’ for Cancer-Seeking Missile

[Ghoti Ichthus]

Previously Failed Cancer Drug Repurposed to Act as ‘Flag’ for Cancer-Seeking Missile​

By Andy Corbley
Feb 17, 2025

"In 2013, UC San Francisco researcher Kevan Shokat was looking to end a 30-year wait for a method to target the biggest cellular driver of tumor growth, known as KRAS. This protein, when mutated, causes unlimited cell proliferation, allowing small tumors to balloon, and come raging back if shrunk.
Shokat succeeded by developing a drug that targeted only the mutated version of KRAS, present in nearly one-third of all cancers, but which is even more prevalent in lung, pancreatic, and colon cancer tumors.
However, his discovery of how to target KRAS never matured into a surefire way of destroying it—future experiments showed how tumors that lost KRAS proteins would come back again.
“We suspected early on that the KRAS drugs might serve as permanent flags for cancer cells,” Charly Craik, PhD, a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF and co-senior author of the study, told UCSF Press.
Craik, with Shokat on his team, has now used the already FDA-approved drug called sotorasib to flag KRAS-containing tumors and then unleashed a radioactive antibody to seek out and bind to them, with the sotorasib acting as a waypoint."

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Previously Failed Cancer Drug Repurposed to Act as 'Flag' for Cancer-Seeking Missile

A discovery of how to target mutated proteins in tumors made a decade ago never matured into a surefire way of destroying them.

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