Pioneering scientific research that has applied artificial intelligence to its results has revealed new vulnerabilities in one of the genes that most frequently mutate in cancers, “KRAS”, and opens the door to design more effective treatments to attack malignant tumors.
The research has been developed by Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona and the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge (United Kingdom), and was published this Monday in the prestigious journal Nature.
As explained by the Center for Genomic Regulation in a statement, the “KRAS” gene is one of the genes that registers the most mutations in cancers of many types, and is found in one in ten human cancers, with a higher prevalence in severe types such as the one of pancreas and lung.
The protein generated by “KRAS” is compared in scientific jargon to the “Star of death” of the Star Wars universe, due to its spherical shape and impenetrability, and has historically been considered “unapproachable” since its discovery in 1982.
To control a protein, you need a kind of key that can open its lock and access it, although proteins also usually have secondary locks on parts of their surface, called allosteric places.