UC Riverside

KRAS is a gene that plays a critical role in cell signaling and is commonly mutated in various forms of cancer. These mutations can lead to uncontrolled cell growth and resistance to certain cancer treatments, including chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy. Understanding how to suppress the oncogenic activity mutated KRAS has been in the past years a challenging goal for the development of new cancer treatments. Recent advances in cancer research have led to the development of targeted therapies that aim to inhibit the function of specific mutants of KRAS. However, these drugs only target two specific mutations, namely the G12C and G12D, while several other activating mutations are insensitive to those agents. Hence, this research will focus on the design of novel strategies to characterize putative KRAS inhibitors in particular targeting the G12V mutant. The studies presented add know-how to the evolving toolbox of strategies necessary to target KRAS, hence may facilitate progress in the field.