Developing Chemical Probes to Decipher Gankyrin Biology

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Abstract. Gankyrin is an oncoprotein overexpressed in numerous cancer types and appears to play key roles in regulating cell proliferation, cell migration and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. These roles are primarily due to gankyrin’s numerous protein-protein interactions. The importance of these protein-protein interactions has been demonstrated by either decreasing gankyrin expression levels or directly disrupting its protein-protein interactions, which has resulted in decreased cell proliferation, cell migration and epithelial-mesenchymal transition, as well as disease severity in animal models of numerous cancer types. Therefore, gankyrin has been identified as an intriguing protein in multiple cancer types. However, much of how gankyrin regulates cell proliferation, cell migration and epithelial-mesenchymal transition is poorly understood. The overall goal of this proposal is to further develop our gankyrin-targeting probes which can be utilized to decipher much of gankyrin’s biological role in regulating cancer cell proliferation, migration and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Furthermore, these probes will help in validating gankyrin as a therapeutic target due to its diverse roles in multiple cancer types. In order to achieve this goal, we are seeking to improve the ability of the cjoc42 scaffold to bind gankyrin and increase efficacy in specific cell-based assays. This proposal will also seek to provide preliminary data about gankyrin’s role in cancer biology, but the primary focus will be to develop and validate our probes as useful in future experiments. Ultimately, this proposal will provide the chemical probes required to fully understand gankyrin’s biological roles which will directly impact therapeutic advancements in multiple cancer types.