How can we harness the body’s own system to fight disease?
Learn more about targeted protein degradation — and take a closer look at how Bristol Myers Squibb scientists are advancing approaches like CELMoD agents, ligand-directed degraders, and degrader antibody conjugates.
Video transcript
(light music) [Narrator]
Many processes of the body are driven by two or more proteins interacting.
Inside every cell within the body, proteins constantly bump into one another. These interactions are tightly regulated and are an essential and normal part of human biology.
By influencing which proteins interact, scientists can impact how cells behave, and, ultimately, what happens in the body.
Researchers at BMS are leveraging three different modalities for targeted protein degradation: CELMoD agents, ligand-directed degraders, or LDDs, which are 3-part molecules, and degrader antibody conjugates, or DACs, which are CELMoD agents attached to an antibody to precisely deliver therapeutic payload.
This three-pronged approach to research allows scientists to match the right therapeutic modality to a molecular mechanism of action to modulate disease targets most effectively, and opens up a new realm of possibilities for scientists to design potential medicines for targets previously thought to be undruggable.
Let's take a closer look at CELMoD agents, also known as molecular glues—one approach scientists at Bristol Myers Squibb are leveraging to encourage protein interactions that can lead to potential new medicines
These agents act as molecular glue and work by first binding to a pocket on the surface of a protein called cereblon.
Once the molecular glue is bound onto the protein complex surface, it changes what that protein complex can stick to, in some cases, allowing it to glue to a target protein that otherwise would have no interaction with it.
BMS scientists carefully design these molecular glues to target harmful proteins involved in diseases such as cancer. In those cases, once stuck, the interaction can cause the harmful target protein to be broken down by the body’s natural protein degradation process.
By applying this mechanism, scientists can now target thousands of previously ‘undruggable’ proteins—expanding the possibilities for treatment across diseases like cancer and beyond.