Folding Forum

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Curious if P7600 is somehow involved here as it mentions the integrin protein?

hi bollix47 -

Thanks for sharing this interesting paper! This research is not directly related to P7600 beyond both involving integrins, which are expressed almost ubiquitously on the surface of cancer cells. Unfortunately, I know very little about cancer so can't elaborate much more about how integrins play a role in metastasis, etc.

What the Cochran group has done here at Stanford, however, is engineer knottin proteins (of the kind being simulated in P7600) that attach to integrins on the surface of cancer cells. This is nice because then we can label the knottins with some kind of reporter - such as a PET probe - that makes any cancer in the body light up in an imaging scan. While this doesn't directly attack the cancer, the hope is it will tell doctors exactly where that cancerous tissue is hiding out so they can be smart about tacking it.

Furthermore, the hope is that knottins can be used to bind to other things, either as imaging agents or drugs. They could possibly be a versatile platform for all kinds of scientific and medical applications due to their strange structure. P7600 is an attempt to understand the dynamics that these proteins exhibit, with the hope that this information can help with future engineering ventures.