We recently published a review on this topic, and we’ll soon have our first data out investigating this in the lab too!

There are a few drugs that target PIM kinases, that have been investigated pre-clinically, or in early stage clinical trials. PIM kinases do seem like promising targets in prostate cancer – they are proto-oncogenes, they seem to be expressed more often in prostate cancer tissue than benign tissue, and perhaps also associate with particularly aggressive disease. But sadly the drugs available to date haven’t skyrocketed through trials to approval and use in the clinic. This is partly due to the drugs themselves (maybe the next generation of drugs will be better, we hope) but we also suspect it might be a better strategy to co-target PIM with other interconnected pathways, using combinations of drugs, or even individual multi-targeted drugs.

In our review, we summarized some of the drugs available to carry out research on, that directly target PIM, as well as ones that we think could be used in combination with PIM inhibition:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-0109-y

I was also involved in another review which took an in depth look at the role of PIM in resistance to other treatments and in immune evasion, across various cancer types.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163725819302062

Overall, yes we think PIM is a promising target in prostate cancer as well as other cancers, and we suspect it will be best targeted as part of a combination therapy approach, and perhaps in the resistance setting.