Presentation: New Small Molecule Protein Degraders for Cancer Therapy
Stephen M. Hinshaw, PhD
Senior Scientist,
Stanford Cancer Institute
What is your presentation about?
Small molecules that induce protein degradation hold tremendous potential as new medicines because they catalyze destruction of disease-causing proteins and can thus produce pharmacologic effects that outlast the drugs themselves. I will talk about small molecule protein degraders of kinases. I will also discuss a novel engineering strategy for discovering protein-degrading small molecules with favorable drug-like properties.
How do you hope your presentation will impact breast cancer research, care, or advocacy?
It is amazing that, with a little chemical ingenuity and a team-first environment, we can reasonably expect to make rapid progress in finding new therapeutics in our lifetime. I hope to express this optimism. A second point I wish to convey by example is the enormous opportunity attendant to therapeutics with novel mechanisms of action, and I hope to convince audience members to be optimistic and open-minded about the potential of these new agents to positively affect patients.
How did you get involved in this particular area of breast cancer research, care, or advocacy?
I have a research background and am interested in developing new classes of therapeutics and new paths to discovery. The long road from basic discovery work to the clinic involves many intellectually stimulating challenges, and most of these require creativity and teamwork to overcome. Like many people, I became interested in this area because of experiences with cancer in my family, and I remained interested because I enjoyed the people I was working with and the particular characteristics of the research area as they are described above.
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