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eEF2K: an atypical kinase target for cancer

  1. Louisa Temme

    1. Institut für Pharmazeutische und Medizinische Chemie der Universität Münster, Münster, Germany. *These authors contributed equally.

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  2. Christopher R. M. Asquith

    1. Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA. *These authors contributed equally.

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Eukaryotic elongation factor 2 kinase (eEF2K) is an atypical member of the α-kinase family, and shows no sequence similarity to classical protein kinases. The identification of eEF2K as a key regulator of several cellular processes implicated in tumorigenesis, as well as reports of its upregulation in various cancers and linkage to poor patient outcomes, has led to growing interest in its potential as an anticancer target (J. Mol. Med. 98, 775–787; 2020).

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Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 20, 577 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41573-021-00124-5

Acknowledgements

This article is part of a series from the NIH Common Fund Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) program. The goal of IDG is to catalyse research on understudied proteins from druggable gene families by providing reagents, phenotypes and a mineable database; focusing on GPCRs, kinases and ion channels. For more information, see https://druggablegenome.net/

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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