3 Cutting-Edge, Protein-Degrader Biotech Stocks to Watch
In this clip from "The Pharma & Biotech Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Feb. 2, Motley Fool contributor Brian Orelli discusses the current drug developments of biotech companies and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each company as a stock pick.
Brian Orelli: This is a slide from Kymera (NASDAQ: KYMR), which is one of the three companies we'll talk about, but all three companies have exactly the same mechanism of action. It's just these pink things are the drug and these pink things are the things that are different. The green thing is the thing that we want to start with one. The green thing is the protein that we want to degrade. Then, what they do is they design a drug that can bind to the protein we want to degrade. Then, they also bind to this E3 ubiquitin ligase, and E3 ubiquitin ligase connects to E2 ubiquitin ligase, and then it's got a little ubiquitin, which is a very small protein that will come up in Slide 2. Then, in Slide 2, it's showing that it binds, the drug helps bring the E2 and E3 and ubiquitin next to the protein and then it just starts creating these ubiquitin chains. Then, once you have these ubiquitin chains, that signals to the cell to send it to the proteasome, which then degrades the protein. This is a natural way without this drug, normally an E3 would bind to a protein that doesn't look right, it's been misfolded. It would bind to a protein that was misfolded, start throwing on ubiquitins and then it would go to the proteasome. What these protein degraders are doing is they're adding this step here so we can cause this E3 to bind to whatever protein we want, not just proteins that have been misfolded and, therefore, definitely should be degraded.
Source Fool.com