Circular mRNA encoded PROTAC (RiboPROTAC) as a new platform for the degradation of intracellular therapeutic targets

Abstract

Although proteolysis targeting chimera (PROTAC) technology that hijacking the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) to artificially degrade protein is an emerging promising technology for many undruggable targets, it still faces several challenges, such as the difficulty to select high specificity molecule to protein of interest (POI), and only few of the E3-ligase are suitable for PROTAC mediated protein degradation. Protein-based PROTAC, termed BioPROTAC, owns the advantage of specificity but lacks membrane permeability. Here, we develop a new targeted protein degrading platform, which we termed RiboPROTAC, by encoding BioPROTAC protein degraders with circular mRNA (cmRNA) and delivering intracellularly. In this way, intracellular protein GFP and nuclear protein PCNA were successfully degraded. For PCNA targeting, not only the level of target protein is strongly decreased, but also the cell function related is strongly interfered, such as cell proliferation, apoptosis, as well as the cell cycle. What is more, for the first time, we observed that degrading PCNA with RiboPROTAC causes immunogenic cell death (ICD), although not strong, but was verified in vivo. Importantly, our in vivo results demonstrated that cmRNA encoded PCNA degrader exhibited significant tumor suppression effect, thus we provide the first proof of concept for the application of RiboPROTAC as potential mRNA therapeutic. We consider that RiboPROTAC is a new and superior PROTAC technology for targeting the undruggable targets.