Early Clinical Success of MTA-Cooperative PRMT5 Inhibitors for the Treatment of CDKN2A/MTAP-Deleted Cancers

Summary: CDKN2A encodes the tumor suppressors p16 and p14ARF and is the most common homozygously deleted gene in all human cancers; tumors frequently codelete the nearby gene MTAP, creating a dependency on PRMT5. In this issue of Cancer Discovery, Engstrom and colleagues report an MTA-cooperative PRMT5 methyltransferase inhibitor MRTX1719 that selectively kills CDKN2A/MTAP-codeleted cancers and demonstrates early efficacy in clinical trials for solid tumors harboring the CDKN2A/MTAP codeletion. See related article by Engstrom et al., p. 2412 (1).