KRAS Inhibitor that Simultaneously Inhibits Nucleotide Exchange Activity and Effector Engagement. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • We describe a small molecule ligand ACA-14 (2-hydroxy-5-{[(2-phenylcyclopropyl) carbonyl] amino} benzoic acid) as an initial lead for the development of direct inhibitors of KRAS, a notoriously difficult anticancer drug target. We show that the compound binds to KRAS near the switch regions with affinities in the low micromolar range and exerts different effects on KRAS interactions with binding partners. Specifically, ACA-14 impedes the interaction of KRAS with its effector Raf and reduces both intrinsic and SOS-mediated nucleotide exchange rates. Likely as a result of these effects, ACA-14 inhibits signal transduction through the MAPK pathway in cells expressing mutant KRAS and inhibits the growth of pancreatic and colon cancer cells harboring mutant KRAS. We thus propose compound ACA-14 as a useful initial lead for the development of broad-acting inhibitors that target multiple KRAS mutants and simultaneously deplete the fraction of GTP-loaded KRAS while abrogating the effector-binding ability of the already GTP-loaded fraction.

published proceedings

  • ACS Bio Med Chem Au

altmetric score

  • 3.25

author list (cited authors)

  • Pagba, C. V., Gupta, A. K., Naji, A. K., van der Hoeven, D., Churion, K., Liang, X., ... Gorfe, A. A.

citation count

  • 1

complete list of authors

  • Pagba, Cynthia V||Gupta, Amit K||Naji, Ali K||van der Hoeven, Dharini||Churion, Kelly||Liang, Xiaowen||Jakubec, Jacob||Hook, Magnus||Zuo, Yan||Martinez de Kraatz, Marisela||Frost, Jeffrey A||Gorfe, Alemayehu A

publication date

  • December 2022