Targeting Post-Transcriptional RNA-Modification with a First-to-Clinic METTL3 Inhibitor: STC15

The AACR 2023 first disclosures presented in the Chemistry in Cancer Research’s “New Drugs on the Horizon” sessions are always fascinating. This article contains the structures of all of the novel small molecule first disclosures presented at AACR in the session, along with notes on their significance, and another molecule disclosed in the [...]

In this update of small molecules in the news for February 2023, we will cover recent: - Molecules in Motion : clinical trial updates and FDA filings - Negative Readouts : halted, discontinued or altered clinical trials - Million-Dollar Molecules : recent M&A’s, IPOs, and other fundraising - Potential Approvals : recent NDA filings and [...]

Momelotinib is a JAK inhibitor approved by the FDA in September 2023 for treating myelofibrosis. Last year, the molecule’s co-inventors, Andrew Wilks and Christopher Burns, gave a Drug Hunter Flash talk about the development of this drug with a fascinating mechanism of action.

In celebration of the molecule’s advancement, here we recap their brilliant story, including Wilks’ discovery of the JAK kinases and how he gave them their name, and the long, sometimes fraught journey of momelotinib through several companies before its acquisition and commercialization by GSK.

The Hippo pathway is a well-known regulator of tissue growth and organ size and gets its name from the Hippo kinase (Hpo in Drosophila, MST1/2 in humans), which when mutated leads to “hippopotamus”-like tissue overgrowth. Recently, industry interest in the pathway has increased thanks to several independent studies in 2023, and the field appears to be at an important inflection point for drug discovery. Here we review current efforts and therapeutic hypotheses for drugging the TEAD transcription factors in cancer, including clinical molecules, paralog-selective molecules, and TEAD degraders.

This article highlights million-dollar molecules that were recently in the news with related patent applications that give clues to their structures and properties. This edition includes Maze’s glycogen synthase 1 (GYS1) inhibitors that were recently licensed to Sanofi, allosteric androgen receptor (AR) modulators that may be of interest to targeted protein degradation researchers, brain-penetrant HER2 and ROCK2 inhibitors, and MDM2 degraders.