“Doctors have had a hit list of transcription factors for decades, but we have lacked a way to target them,” said UChicago chemist Raymond Moellering, the senior author on the study. “This work sets the stage for letting us go directly for any transcription factor. If you ask clinicians what they want in order to treat cancer, it’s a way to inhibit Myc. Using the traditional drugs on transcription factors is like trying to get a foothold on a 50-foot vertical cliff. Right away when we ran the gels, we could see that we had cracked the code for the right configuration.”