‘Chemists build natural anti-cancer compound with efficient new process’
7 August 2020
14:00
Scripps Research chemists Hans Renata, Ph.D., and Alexander Adibekian, Ph.D., have discovered a way to efficiently create a synthetic version of a valuable natural compound called cepafungin I, which has shown promise as an anti-cancer agent.
Through this, they were able to understand how the bacterial secretion is able to block a piece of molecular machinery known as a proteasome—a strategy that many existing cancer medications use to destroy tumor cells. They found that cepafungin I bound to not one but two places on the proteasome, enacting a powerful result. Their report appears in the journal Cell Chemical Biology.
