Big Pharma Bets on Body’s Garbage-Disposal System to Beat Cancer

At their most basic level, many of the deadliest diseases are caused by nests of misguided proteins. Most medicines work by attaching themselves to these proteins and temporarily shutting them down. In the 1990s, Yale University scientist Craig Crews and a colleague had a radical idea: What if a drug could destroy a bad protein by making it a target of the body’s own molecular trash disposal machines?