Targeted degradation of MERTK and other TAM receptor paralogs by heterobifunctional targeted protein degraders

Gadiyar, V., Patel, G., Chen, J., Vigil, D., Ji, N., Campbell, V., Sharma, K., Shi, Y., Weiss, M., Birge, R., & Davra, V. (2023). Frontiers in Immunology, 14.

In collaboration with the Raymond Birge laboratory at the Department of Microbiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, and Center for Cell Signaling at Rutgers University, Kymera published a paper in Frontiers in Immunology demonstrating degraders can be designed to selectively degrade multiple TAM receptors and modulate receptor expression in vitro and in vivo. While not currently in our active pipeline, this work demonstrates the utility of proteome editing enabled by degraders toward therapeutically relevant pathway biology in preclinical models, and shows the technology could serve as a viable therapeutic strategy for targeting MERTK and other TAM receptors that are expressed across a range of liquid and solid tumors.