Development of Chimeric Molecules That Degrade the Estrogen Receptor Using Decoy Oligonucleotide Ligands
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Updated: Oct 6, 2025

Detecting the Ligand-binding Domain Dimerization Activity of Estrogen Receptor Alpha Using the Mammalian Two-Hybrid Assay
Published on: December 19, 2018
Miyako Naganuma1,2,3, Nobumichi Ohoka4, Genichiro Tsuji1
1Division of Organic Chemistry, National Institute of Health Sciences, Kanagawa 210-9501, Japan.
Abstract:
Targeted protein degradation using chimeric small molecules, such as proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) and specific and nongenetic inhibitors of apoptosis protein (IAP)-dependent protein erasers (SNIPERs), has attracted attention as a method for degrading intracellular target proteins via the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS). These chimeric molecules target a variety of proteins using small molecules that can bind to the proteins. However, it is difficult to develop such degraders in the absence of suitable small-molecule ligands for the target proteins, such as for transcription factors (TFs). Therefore, we constructed the chimeric molecule LCL-ER(dec), which consists of a decoy oligonucleotide that can bind to estrogen receptor α (ERα) and an IAP ligand, LCL161 (LCL), in a click reaction. LCL-ER(dec) was found to selectively degrade ERα via the UPS. These findings will be applicable to the development of other oligonucleotide-type degraders that target different TFs.
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