Identification of Novel Malarial Cysteine Protease Inhibitors Using Structure-Based Virtual Screening of a Focused Cysteine Protease Inhibitor Library

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• 作者：Falgun Shah ; Prasenjit Mukherjee ; Jiri Gut ; Jennifer Legac ; Philip J. Rosenthal ; Babu L. Tekwani ; Mitchell A. Avery
• 刊名：Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
• 出版年：2011
• 出版时间：April 25, 2011
• 年：2011
• 卷：51
• 期：4
• 页码：852-864
• 全文大小：1221K
• 年卷期：v.51,no.4(April 25, 2011)
• ISSN：1549-960X

文摘

Malaria, in particular that caused by Plasmodium falciparum, is prevalent across the tropics, and its medicinal control is limited by widespread drug resistance. Cysteine proteases of P. falciparum, falcipain-2 (FP-2) and falcipain-3 (FP-3), are major hemoglobinases, validated as potential antimalarial drug targets. Structure-based virtual screening of a focused cysteine protease inhibitor library built with soft rather than hard electrophiles was performed against an X-ray crystal structure of FP-2 using the Glide docking program. An enrichment study was performed to select a suitable scoring function and to retrieve potential candidates against FP-2 from a large chemical database. Biological evaluation of 50 selected compounds identified 21 diverse nonpeptidic inhibitors of FP-2 with a hit rate of 42%. Atomic Fukui indices were used to predict the most electrophilic center and its electrophilicity in the identified hits. Comparison of predicted electrophilicity of electrophiles in identified hits with those in known irreversible inhibitors suggested the soft-nature of electrophiles in the selected target compounds. The present study highlights the importance of focused libraries and enrichment studies in structure-based virtual screening. In addition, few compounds were screened against homologous human cysteine proteases for selectivity analysis. Further evaluation of structure鈭抋ctivity relationships around these nonpeptidic scaffolds could help in the development of selective leads for antimalarial chemotherapy.