How cancer drugs find their targets
In the watery inside of a cell, complex processes take place in tiny functional compartments called organelles. Energy-producing mitochondria are organelles, as is the frilly golgi apparatus, which helps to transport cellular materials. Both of these compartments are bound by thin membranes. But in the past few years, research at Whitehead Institute and elsewhere has shown that there are other cellular organelles held together without a membrane. These organelles, called condensates, are tiny droplets which keep certain proteins close together amidst the chaos of the cell, allowing complex functions to take place within. “We know of about 20 types of condensate in the cell so far,” says Isaac Klein, a postdoc in Richard Young’s lab at the Whitehead Institute and oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Now, in a paper published in Science on June 19, Klein and Ann Boija, another postdoc in Young’s lab, show the mechanism by which small molecules,...