Research: CANCER Folding Project #16489

Kinases are a major target for a variety of cancer therapies, but their mechanism of action is relatively unknown at a detailed atomic level, preventing us from understanding and optimizing known inhibitors.

One example is the Serine/Threonine Kinase RIPK2.

RIPK2 inhibition is useful for cancer targeting as it prevents RIPK2 from binding a protein partner named XIAP.

In fact, there are already 3 known inhibitors that bind to RIPK2 and prevent RIPK2-XIAP binding! However, it remains difficult to optimize these ligands for clinical purposes because we do not understand how any of these three inhibitors actually act on RIPK2 to prevent XIAP binding behavior.

These four projects are simulating RIPK2 by itself and bound to each of the three inhibitors, with the hope that this will reveal a more detailed mechanism of how each inhibitor works to prevent XIAP binding.

As a bonus, this will help reveal how RIPK2 *binds* XIAP (also unknown)! In this set of projects we are studying the following systems: 16466 – RIPK2 16467 – RIPK2:CSLP43 inhibitor-bound complex 16468 – RIPK2:CSLP48 inhibitor-bound complex 16469 – RIPK2:GSK583 inhibitor-bound complex 16470 – RIPK2:WEHI-345 inhibitor-bound complex 16471 – RIPK2:BI inhibitor-bound complex 16488 – RIPK2:BI inhibitor-bound complex (alt configuration) 16489 – RIPK2:BI inhibitor-bound complex (alt configuration 2) 16490 – RIPK2:NVS inhibitor-bound complex.