上海科技大学知识管理系统

Aberrant overexpression of non-receptor tyrosine kinase FER has been reported in a variety of ovarian carcinoma-derived tumor cells and is a poor prognosis factor for patient survival. It plays an important role in tumor cell migration and invasion, acting concurrently in both kinase-dependent and -independent manners, which is not easily suppressed by conventional enzymatic inhibitors. Nevertheless, the proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) technology offers a superior efficacy over conventional activity-based inhibitors by targeting both enzymatic and scaffold functions simultaneously. Hence in this study, we report the development of two PROTAC compounds that promote robust FER degradation in a cereblon-dependent manner. Both PROTAC degraders outperform an FDA-approved drug, Brigatinib, in ovarian cancer cell motility suppression. Importantly, these PROTAC compounds also degrade multiple oncogenic FER fusion proteins identified in human tumor samples. These results lay an experimental foundation to apply the PROTAC strategy to antagonize metastasis in ovarian and other types of cancers with aberrant expression of FER kinase and highlight PROTACs as a superior strategy for targeting proteins with multiple tumor-promoting functions.