A Method to Conditionally Measure Target Engagement at Intracellular RAS and RAF Complexes

Dysfunction of the RAS/mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway is a common driver of human cancers. As such, both the master regulator of the pathway, RAS, and its proximal kinase effectors, RAFs, have been of interest as drug targets for decades. Importantly, signaling within the RAS/MAPK pathway is highly coordinated due to the formation of a higher-order complex called the RAS/RAF signalosome, which may minimally contain dimers of both RAS and RAF protomers. In the disease state, RAS and RAF assemble in homo- and/or heterodimeric forms. Traditionally, drug development campaigns for both RAS and RAF have utilized biochemical assays of purified recombinant protein. As these assays do not query the RAS or RAF proteins in their full-length and complexed forms in cells, potency results collected using these assays have often failed to correlate with inhibition of the MAPK pathway. To more accurately quantify engagement at this signaling components, we present a bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET)-based method to conditionally measure target engagement at individual protomers within the RAS/RAF signalosome in live cells.