Building upon a wealth of published knowledge surrounding the pyrazolopyrimidine scaffold, we designed a small library around the most selective small molecule CK2 inhibitors reported. Through extensive evaluation of this library we identified inhibitor 24 (SGC-CK2-1) as a potent, selective, and cell-active CK2 chemical probe. Remarkably, despite years of research pointing to CK2 as a key driver in cancer, our probe did not elicit an antiproliferative phenotype in cell lines tested. While many publications have attempted tocharacterize CK2 function, CK2 biology is complex and a high-quality chemical tool like SGC-CK2-1 will aid in connecting CK2 functions to phenotypes.
Group-Based Optimization of Potent and Cell-Active Inhibitors of the von Hippel–Lindau (VHL) E3 Ubiquitin Ligase: Structure–Activity Relationships Leading to the Chemical Probe (2S,4R)-1-((S)-2-(1-Cyanocyclopropanecarboxamido)-3,3-dimethylbutanoyl)-4-hydroxy-N-(4-(4-methylthiazol-5-yl)benzyl)pyrrolidine-2-carboxamide (VH298)
