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

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.