From the UCR News Article:

"A University of California, Riverside, research team has come up with a new approach to targeting cancer cells that circumvents a challenge faced by currently available cancer drugs.

A cancer target is often a rogue protein that signals cancer cells to proliferate uncontrollably and invade organs. Modern cancer drugs have emerged that work by striking a tight bond between the drug and a particular amino acid called cysteine, one of the 20 natural amino acids that constitute our proteins. Cysteine is unique in that it can react with specific organic functional groups to form a strong molecular bond. 

Only a few new cancer drugs that target cysteine have been recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA.  A challenge cancer researchers face is that cysteine is rarely found within binding sites of cancer targets, limiting the application of this approach to only a few drug targets." 

Read the entire UCR News Article here.

The study results are published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and can be found here.