PROTAC, as a highly valued bifunctional molecule, provides a new approach for the drug development of traditional undruggable targets, which holds significant potential in cancer therapy and other disease treatments. However, due to the complicated design process and hard synthesis task, the development of traditional PROTAC drugs is both complex and costly, especially for the design of multitargeting PROTACs. Herein, considering the flexibility and efficacy of the split-and-mix strategy, we proposed a novel Multi-SM-PROTAC platform capable of stable performance with over three ligands simultaneously. In this study, the self-assembly advantage of the split-and-mix strategy was utilized to easily achieve: (1) the simultaneous degradation of dual targets, (2) multi-E3 ligase-mediated degradation of a single target, and (3) multi-E3 ligase-mediated degradation of dual targets. By successfully degrading multiple proteins, it was proven that the Multi-SM-PROTAC platform could achieve multimodule selection and programming for specific therapeutic goals, demonstrating its broad application prospects in drug discovery.
Wang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.