Discovery of Potent and Selective G9a Degraders for the Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer

G9a, which was initially identified as a histone H3 Lys9 (H3K9) methyltransferase, is potentially an attractive therapeutic target for human cancers. Despite its importance, there is no available selective G9a chemical probe because its homologous protein GLP shares approximately 80% of its sequence with G9a. The development of G9a chemical probes with high selectivity for G9a over GLP is a big challenge but is extremely valuable for understanding G9a-related biology. Herein, we developed a first-in-class selective G9a degrader G9D-4, which induced a dose- and time-dependent G9a degradation without degradation of GLP. G9D-4 exhibited effective antiproliferative activities in a panel of pancreatic cancer cell lines and was able to sensitize KRAS(G12D) mutant pancreatic cancer cells to KRAS(G12D) inhibitor MRTX1133. These data clearly demonstrated the practicality and importance of a selective G9a degrader as a preliminary chemical probe suitable for understanding G9a-related biology and a promising strategy for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.