Odd couples

A Stanford University team has built synthetic ligands that force cytokine receptor subunits into unnatural pairings, and showed the "synthekines" were able to trigger new patterns of signaling and cytokine secretion in blood cells. The mix-and-match approach could enable creation of new therapeutics with previously inaccessible functions.

There are about 40 human cytokine receptor subunits that signal through Janus kinase (JAK) and signal transducer and activator (STAT) proteins. Induction of signaling depends on the cytokine binding two receptor subunits and triggering their dimerization. While these subunits could theoretically form over 800 heterodimer or homodimer pairs, there are less than 50 cytokine ligands in the human genome, which limits the number receptor combinations that actually get formed...