A January 2024 study by the University of California, Riverside, said
“Normally, MYC’s activity is strictly controlled. In cancer cells, it becomes hyper active, and is not regulated properly,”
“MYC is less like food for cancer cells and more like a steroid that promotes cancer’s rapid growth,”
“That is why MYC is a culprit in 75% of all human cancer cases.”
“It’s basically a glob of randomness,”
“Conventional drug discovery pipelines rely on well-defined structures, and this does not exist for MYC.”
“Peptides can assume a variety of forms, shapes, and positions,”
“Once you bend and connect them to form rings, they cannot adopt other possible forms, so they then have a low level of randomness. This helps with the binding.”
“We improved the binding performance of this peptide over previous versions by two orders of magnitude,”
“This makes it closer to our drug development goals.”
“MYC represents chaos, basically, because it lacks structure. That, and its direct impact on so many types of cancer make it one of the holy grails of cancer drug development,”
“We are very excited that it is now within our grasp.”