Screening of protein-based inhibitors for the intracellular domain of epidermal growth factor receptor by directed evolution using the yeast Gγ recruitment system

Abstract

Protein-based therapeutics, including antibodies and antibody-like-proteins, have increasingly attracted attention due to their high specificity compared to small-molecular drugs. The Gγ recruitment system, one of the in vivo yeast two-hybrid systems for detecting protein–protein interactions, has been previously developed using yeast signal transduction machinery. In this study, we modified the Gγ recruitment system to screen the protein mutants that efficiently bind to the intracellular domain of the epidermal growth factor receptor L858R mutant (cytoEGFR^L858R). Using the modified platform, we performed in vivo directed evolution for growth factor receptor-bound protein 2 (Grb2) and its truncated variant containing only the Src-homology 2 (SH2) domain, successfully identifying several mutants that more strongly bound to cytoEGFR^L858R than their parental proteins. Some of them contained novel beneficial mutations (F108Y and Q144H) and specifically bound to the recombinant cytosolic phosphorylated EGFR in vitro, highlighting the utility of the evolutionary platform.