Mayor-Ruiz Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2021

Chemical rewiring of E3 ubiquitin ligases as a generalizable therapeutic approach

Classical drug design relies mostly on the availability of accessible pockets to block specific protein activities. Despite tremendous progress, more than 80% of all human proteins remain beyond the reach of traditional inhibitor-centric approaches. Chemical ablation of protein abundance using bivalent degraders (PROTACs) moves away from an occupancy-driven (inhibition) to an event-driven (binding) pharmacology. However, their design is intrinsically limited to targets that are ligandable via chemical probes. To tackle current unmet clinical problems, we need transformative paradigms. Fortuitous discoveries have illustrated the immense potential of monovalent degraders. These molecules…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.