ABOVE: © Lucy Reading-IkKanda
In the early 2000s, back when biologist Olivia Rossanese worked as an investigator at GlaxoSmithKline, fighting cancer was an exercise in brute force. Researchers at the company had set their sights on developing inhibitors of B-Raf, a protein kinase involved in cell signaling that becomes dysfunctional in many cancers, and “what we were thinking was that we needed to hit this . . . protein so hard,” says Rossanese. “You had to inhibit it 99.999 percent to shut down the signaling pathway.”
In 2008, Rossanese and her GSK colleagues discovered just the sort of compound they were after: a small molecule, dabrafenib, that potently inhibited B-Raf and showed striking effects in melanoma patients with certain mutations in the BRAF gene. With dabrafenib, says Rossanese, “we see really amazing responses, and melanomas go away.” The drug was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in ...
