Comprehensive profiling of clinically approved kinase inhibitors reveals mutation-specific inhibitors and opportunities for drug repurposing

  • Nat Biotechnol. 2026 Apr 20. doi: 10.1038/s41587-026-03090-8.
Mehlam Saifudeen  #  1 Songli Zhu  #  1 Shuguang Liang  #  2 Mia Eason  2 Alison Goupil  2 Deanna F Mische  1 Christian M Loch  2 Haiching Ma  2 Marina Chan  3 Taranjit S Gujral  4  5
Affiliations
  • 1. Human Biology Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Seattle, WA, USA.
  • 2. Reaction Biology, Malvern, PA, USA.
  • 3. Human Biology Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Seattle, WA, USA. [email protected].
  • 4. Human Biology Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Seattle, WA, USA. [email protected].
  • 5. Department of Pharmacology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. [email protected].
  • # Contributed equally.
Abstract

Protein kinases are central to cell signaling and key drug targets in Cancer. To inform potential repurposing of kinase inhibitors, we profiled 86 of the ~100 approved kinase inhibitors against 758 kinases, including 409 wild-type and 349 oncogenic variants using a biochemical kinase assay. Our results increase the number of druggable kinases from 89 to 235, revealing that 94% of mutations and 97% of fusions represented in our samples are inhibited by at least one existing drug. The dataset revealed mutation-specific selectivity, especially in tyrosine kinases FGFR and MET, highlighting gaps and repurposing opportunities. We experimentally validated several actionable findings, including tepotinib to target the IRAK1/4-cholesterol pathway in glioblastoma, brigatinib to target the MARK2/3-Hippo pathway in pancreatic Cancer and gilteritinib to overcome MET mutation-driven drug resistance and metastasis. To facilitate exploration of our data, we provide KIRHub, a web-based tool that allows identification of existing inhibitors of wild-type and mutated kinases to guide precision oncology.

Products