Molecular glues are an intriguing therapeutic modality that harness small-molecules to induce interactions between proteins that typically do not interact, thus enabling the creation of novel protein functions not naturally encoded in biology. While molecular glues such as thalidomide and rapamycin have catalyzed drug discovery efforts, such molecules are rare and have often been discovered fortuitously, thus limiting their potential as a general strategy for therapeutic intervention of disease. Historically, natural products have proven to be important sources of molecular glues and we postulated that natural products bearing multiple electrophilic sites may be an unexplored source of such molecules, potential... More
Molecular glues are an intriguing therapeutic modality that harness small-molecules to induce interactions between proteins that typically do not interact, thus enabling the creation of novel protein functions not naturally encoded in biology. While molecular glues such as thalidomide and rapamycin have catalyzed drug discovery efforts, such molecules are rare and have often been discovered fortuitously, thus limiting their potential as a general strategy for therapeutic intervention of disease. Historically, natural products have proven to be important sources of molecular glues and we postulated that natural products bearing multiple electrophilic sites may be an unexplored source of such molecules, potentially through multi-covalent attachment. Using activity-based protein profiling (ABPP)-based chemoproteomic platforms, we show that members of the manumycin family of polyketides, which bear multiple potentially reactive sites, target C374 of the putative E3 ligase UBR7 in breast cancer cells to impair breast cancer pathogenicity through engaging in molecular glue interactions with the neo-substrate tumor-suppressor TP53, leading to the activation of p53 transcriptional activity and cell death. Our results reveal a previously undiscovered anti-cancer mechanism of this natural product family and highlight the potential for combining chemoproteomics and multi-covalent natural products for the discovery and characterization of new molecular glues.
