Bradley L. Pentelute, PhD (Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator '13-'15), and colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, used a disarmed version of the anthrax toxin to deliver two proteins known as antibody mimics, which can kill cancer cells by disrupting specific proteins inside the cells. In this study, they successfully targeted Bcr-Abl and hRaf-1, which both have known functions in cancer. This is the first demonstration of effective delivery of antibody mimics into cells, which could be applied to develop new drugs for cancer and other diseases. These findings were published in the journal ChemBioChem.
