2020 PPP magazine

Page 46 2020 Paint the Paper Pink Lincoln Daily News October 2020 M any types of human cancers exhibit changes in kinase and phosphatase balances. Drugs that inhibit kinase activity have shown success in the clinic as cancer therapeutics, but the phosphatases still remain a largely underexploited target class due primarily to the lack of understanding of how they cause diseases. Purdue University’s Zhong-Yin Zhang’s team has discovered a novel “phosphatase cascade” that plays a critical role in pancreas, liver, kidney, lung, breast, prostate, brain and other types of cancers . Their findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that a “pro-oncogenic” phosphatase PRL2 exerts its effect by down-regulating PTEN, a tumor- suppressive phosphatase frequently lost in human cancers. “This suggests that PRL2 could be a cancer drug target,” said Zhang, Distinguished Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Chair in Pharmacology and director of the Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery. “Rather than Purdue scientist identifies new target for wide array of cancers CONTINUE