Drug repurposing for cancer and beyond through the RePo-SUDOE project

<p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" class="first" dir="auto" id="d7084353e128">Cancer, the second leading cause of death and illness in Europe, drives the urgent need for innovative therapies, with drug repurposing offering a rapid, cost-effective solution for developing life-saving treatments ¹. The RePo-SUDOE project is an Interreg EU co-funded initiative aiming to position the SUDOE region (Spain, Portugal, and France) as a European leader in drug repurposing. To support this goal, the project involves the creating of an open-access database of therapeutic targets, the identification of promising drugs or therapies with potential biological effects, and the application of both computational and experimental methods to assess their interactions with relevant targets. <p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" dir="auto" id="d7084353e133">The YAP/TAZ-TEAD complex, regulated by the Hippo pathway, plays a pivotal role in driving tumorigenesis and cancer progression, and has been chosen as the starting point for this project due to its strong potential in advancing cancer therapies. This complex contains three well-defined interaction interfaces, which represent attractive targets for identifying compounds capable of disrupting its oncogenic activity ^2-5. To explore this potential, we conducted an extensive bibliographic review and selected three compounds previously reported to disrupt the YAP-TEAD interaction. Building on these preliminary findings, we now aim to develop standardized protocols using biophysical techniques such as Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) and Bio-Layer Interferometry (BLI) to study drug-target interactions and ensure accurate, reproducible, and detailed results. These protocols will be pivotal for advancing drug repurposing efforts in the SUDOE region, with potential applications across a wide range of diseases.