OnCo

Adenosine deaminase (ADA)

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Adenosine deaminase is an enzyme that breaks down adenosine and deoxyadenosine; blocking it with pentostatin poisons lymphocytes, which is why the drug works in hairy cell leukaemia and some T-cell cancers. This dossier gathers the 1 product (1 approved), 0 trials, 0 pathways and 0 resistance routes in the corpus that involve it, with external identifiers so it can be joined to UniProt, ChEMBL, Open Targets and the rest of biology.

Biology

ADA is a zinc-dependent hydrolase expressed in most tissues and at high levels in lymphoid cells. Inhibiting it raises intracellular deoxyadenosine triphosphate, which blocks ribonucleotide reductase and DNA synthesis and triggers apoptosis, an effect most marked in lymphocytes with high deoxynucleoside kinase activity. Pentostatin binds the enzyme almost irreversibly; cladribine, the other purine analogue used in hairy cell leukaemia, is instead a substrate-resistant deoxyadenosine analogue.

Where it is found
  • Lymphocytes and lymphoid tissue (high)
  • Widely expressed in other tissues at lower levels
  • Also present in plasma as extracellular ADA
Class: enzyme · Gene: ADA · Facts checked 2026-09-04 · Target page

External identifiers

Built from HGNC, Ensembl, UniProt and ChEMBL ids

Products by modality and phase

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ModalityApproved
Small molecule
1

No trial in the corpus names this target or one of its products.

Resistance routes

Unaddressed routes →

The resistance atlas has no route that names this target.

No pathway diagram carries this target as a node.

Companion diagnostics

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No companion diagnostic in the registry measures this target.

Preclinical models

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No model entry for this target yet; check the cancer entries on the models page.

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Literature

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Open in Europe PMC

Query for this target: (TITLE:"Adenosine deaminase" OR ABSTRACT:"Adenosine deaminase" OR TITLE:"ADA" OR ABSTRACT:"ADA") AND (cancer OR tumor OR tumour OR oncology OR carcinoma OR lymphoma OR leukemia OR leukaemia OR myeloma OR sarcoma OR melanoma OR glioma). Results are unfiltered search hits about Adenosine deaminase (ADA), not a curated reading list.

Export

The dossier as machine-readable JSON: identifiers from HGNC, Ensembl, UniProt and ChEMBL, products with status, trials, pathways, hotspots, open questions and assays. The full entity record is in the open API at /api/v1/entities/ada.json. Licence CC BY-NC 4.0.