As developers work on cracking KRAS, Germany's Boehringer has quietly begun testing its pan-KRAS drug in humans

For decades, scientists scratched their heads about KRAS, the notorious cancer-causing protein. Its smooth terrain long eluded manipulation, largely due to the absence of a distinct pocket for a drug to latch on to. However, the process of trial and error finally yielded progress — triggering a flock of companies, including Amgen, J&J, Merck, and AstraZeneca, to engineer compounds designed to annex the oft’ mutated oncogene. And now, it looks like Germany’s Boehringer Ingelheim has officially entered the fold.