This drug is target two of the cyclin dependent kinases. These proteins have vital roles in the cell cycle as well as some transcription regulation activity. My two biggest concerns:
- There were too many of them (10 or so CDKs) to be able to discretely target just 1 or 2.
- Playing around with the cell cycle was very high risk and opened the patient up to AEs and maybe even lead to transformation of normal cells.
I think the advancement of structure determination methods and combinatorial chemistry has made my first concern moot. As for the second, perhaps my concerns were overblown.