Crews Lab: Big Pharma Bets on Body’s Garbage-Disposal System to Beat Cancer

In the 1990s, Yale University scientist Craig Crews and a colleague had a radical idea: What if a drug could destroy a bad protein by making it a target of the body’s own molecular trash disposal machines?

Within the last decade, scientists started discovering that some of the most successful medicines turned out to work by piggybacking onto these human trash collectors. Crews and a biotech he founded are racing some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical and biotech companies to turn protein-degrading compounds into drugs. “By hijacking natural quality-control machinery inside cells, we are literally making problem proteins go away,” Crews says.

For more on this story, see the full article in Bloomberg Businessweek.