By Elie Dolgin & Alison Motluk

New drugs that neutralize so-called ‘heat shock’ proteins are nearing market approval to treat cancer. Yet, beyond their tumor-fighting potential, these same drugs have also shown promise against parasites, inflammatory diseases and even neurodegenerative disorders. Elie Dolgin and Alison Motluk talk with the scientists hoping these drugs will turn up the temperature on a broad range of disease targets.

Utpal Tatu can still remember the day when big pharma called. For more than a decade, the biochemist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore had been studying the seemingly esoteric role of molecular chaperones in protein folding in the malaria parasite, and most drug companies paid him no mind. In 2003, he had published a report showing that a drug known to block a molecule called heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) inhibited the growth of malaria parasites in a test tube. Four years later, he modeled the three-dimensional structure of the malaria Hsp90 to demonstrate how inhibitors of the protein thwarted the pathogen. But it was only last year, when Tatu showed that an anti-Hsp90 drug prolonged survival in a mouse model of malaria, that his phone started to ring. “There’s been a lot more interest in the last year or so,” he says.

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Image: Michał Sobkowski, Wikimedia Commons