Degrade and destroy

GTx Inc. thinks there are lessons about castration-resistant prostate cancer to be learned from breast cancer. The company has licensed a technology from the University of Tennessee Research Foundation that selectively degrades androgen receptors, and is designed to rule out resistance by destroying all forms of the receptor.

The approach has proved successful in hormone-dependent breast cancer. Seragon Pharmaceuticals Inc. developed a series of selective estrogen receptor degraders (SERDs) that bind various forms of the estrogen receptor and tag it for degradation. Seragon was acquired by the Genentech Inc. unit of Roche last year, which now has the lead SERD, ARN-810, in Phase II/III testing for advanced estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer...