The Hottest Phrase in the Fight Against Cancer Is Molecular Glue

One of the biggest advances in pancreatic cancer in decades came out of a crazy idea born in a Harvard University lab.

Chemical biologist Gregory Verdine believed you could fight disease-causing proteins hidden inside cells by chemically gluing them to something else in the body and smothering them.

Gregory Verdine at his lab in Watertown, Massachusetts

Photographer: Lucy Lu/Bloomberg

“Everybody told us this is crazy, that it would never work,” he recalls.

Revolution Medicines Inc., which bought one of Verdine’s companies in 2018, recently announced that one of its drugs doubled the typical survival time for patients with aggressive forms of the disease, from 6.7 months to 13.2 months. The full results from ...