Ouch, those regexes hurt! Let's try some /x goodness, using repeaters in the process, noting that ( and , don't need to be escaped in a character class (indeed, a , doesn't need an escape anywhere in a regex): 
$line =~ s/
    \*{2} ( [^\*]+ ) \*{2}
        \s
    ( kinase | isoform | protein | peptide | ligand )
        \s
    \${2} ( [^\$]+ ) \${2}
        \s
    [(,] \s
        \*{2} ( [^\*]+ ) \*{2}
    \s [),]
/**$1_$2_$3_($4)**/gx

[download]
OK, now that that can be read, let's factor out the common ground: 
sub delimited {
    my ( $delimiter ) = @_;
    my $qdelimiter = quotemeta $delimiter;
    return qr/ $qdelimiter{2} ( [^$qdelimiter]+ ) $qdelimiter{2} /x;
}

sub balanced {
    my ( $inside ) = @_;
    return qr/ [(,] $inside [),] /x;
}

my $stars = delimited '*';
my $dollars = delimited '$';
my $words = qr/( kinase | isoform | protein | peptide | ligand )/x;
my $parens = balanced qr/ \s $stars \s /x;

$line =~ s/ $stars \s $words \s $dollars \s $parens /**$1_$2_$3_($4)**
+/gx;

[download]
Note that this will match fields delimited like ( field , or , field ), which you probably don't want.

UPDATE 1: I also stripped out the if ( MATCH ) logic, because a substitution s/OLD/NEW/ is just a no-op if OLD doesn't match.
UPDATE 2: Changed formatting and corrected a few errors in the code.
UPDATE 3: Again.

In reply to Re: regex pattern match problem by JadeNB
in thread regex pattern match problem by newbio

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