Targeting the PTPome in human disease

Abstract

Protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs) play vital roles in numerous cellular processes and are implicated in a growing number of human diseases, ranging from cancer to cardiovascular, immunological, infectious, neurological and metabolic diseases. There are at least 107 genes in the human genome, collectively referred to as the human ‘PTPome’. Here the authors review the involvement of PTPs in human disease, discuss their potential as drug targets, and current efforts to develop PTP inhibitors for the treatment of human disease. Finally, the authors present their view of the future for PTPs as drug targets.

Keywords::

• Alzheimer’s disease
• autoimmune disease
• cancer
• Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome
• diabetes
• epilepsy
• genetic disease
• myelodysplastic syndrome
• Noonan syndrome
• protein tyrosine phosphatase (PTP)
• phosphatase inhibitor

Acknowledgments

The authors apologise to all co-workers whose papers we could not cite here due to space limitations. The authors thank Nunzio Bottini, Michael David, Jack Dixon, Rob Edwards, Gen-Sheng Feng, Adam Godzik, Andrei Osterman, Robert Rickert, Zhong-Yin Zhang and many other co-workers and friends for many stimulating discussions about phosphatases. This work was supported by grants AI35603, AI48032, AI53114, AI53585, AI55741, AI55789 and CA96949 from the National Institutes of Health.