scholarly journals Continuous Evaluation of Ligand Protein Predictions: A Weekly Community Challenge for Drug Docking

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey R. Wagner ◽  
Christopher P. Churas ◽  
Shuai Liu ◽  
Robert V. Swift ◽  
Michael Chiu ◽  
...  

1SummaryDocking calculations can be used to accelerate drug discovery by providing predictions of the poses of candidate ligands bound to a targeted protein. However, studies in the literature use varied docking methods, and it is not clear which work best, either in general or for specific protein targets. In addition, a complete docking calculation requires components beyond the docking algorithm itself, such as preparation of the protein and ligand for calculations, and it is difficult to isolate which aspects of a method are most in need of improvement. To address such issues, we have developed the Continuous Evaluation of Ligand Protein Predictions (CELPP), a weekly blinded challenge for automated docking workflows. Participants in CELPP create a workflow to predict protein-ligand binding poses, which is then tasked with predicting 10-100 new (never before released) protein-ligand crystal structures each week. CELPP evaluates the accuracy of each workflow’s predictions and posts the scores online. CELPP is a new cyberinfrastructure resource to identify the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, help map docking problems to the algorithms most likely to overcome them, and illuminate areas of unmet need in structure-guided drug design.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuriy Khalak ◽  
Gary Tresdern ◽  
Matteo Aldeghi ◽  
Hannah Magdalena Baumann ◽  
David L. Mobley ◽  
...  

The recent advances in relative protein-ligand binding free energy calculations have shown the value of alchemical methods in drug discovery. Accurately assessing absolute binding free energies, although highly desired, remains...


2021 ◽  
Vol 219 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Wang ◽  
Michael A. Crackower ◽  
Hao Wu

Inflammasome proteins play an important role in many diseases of high unmet need, making them attractive drug targets. However, drug discovery for inflammasome proteins has been challenging in part due to the difficulty in solving high-resolution structures using cryo-EM or crystallography. Recent advances in the structural biology of NLRP3 and NLRP1 have provided the first set of data that proves a promise for structure-based drug design for this important family of targets.


Molecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (17) ◽  
pp. 5124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvatore Galati ◽  
Miriana Di Stefano ◽  
Elisa Martinelli ◽  
Giulio Poli ◽  
Tiziano Tuccinardi

In silico target fishing, whose aim is to identify possible protein targets for a query molecule, is an emerging approach used in drug discovery due its wide variety of applications. This strategy allows the clarification of mechanism of action and biological activities of compounds whose target is still unknown. Moreover, target fishing can be employed for the identification of off targets of drug candidates, thus recognizing and preventing their possible adverse effects. For these reasons, target fishing has increasingly become a key approach for polypharmacology, drug repurposing, and the identification of new drug targets. While experimental target fishing can be lengthy and difficult to implement, due to the plethora of interactions that may occur for a single small-molecule with different protein targets, an in silico approach can be quicker, less expensive, more efficient for specific protein structures, and thus easier to employ. Moreover, the possibility to use it in combination with docking and virtual screening studies, as well as the increasing number of web-based tools that have been recently developed, make target fishing a more appealing method for drug discovery. It is especially worth underlining the increasing implementation of machine learning in this field, both as a main target fishing approach and as a further development of already applied strategies. This review reports on the main in silico target fishing strategies, belonging to both ligand-based and receptor-based approaches, developed and applied in the last years, with a particular attention to the different web tools freely accessible by the scientific community for performing target fishing studies.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuyao Yang ◽  
Shuangjia Zheng ◽  
Shimin Su ◽  
Jun Xu ◽  
Hongming Chen

Fragment based drug design represents a promising drug discovery paradigm complimentary to the traditional HTS based lead generation strategy. How to link fragment structures to increase compound affinity is remaining a challenge task in this paradigm. Hereby a novel deep generative model (AutoLinker) for linking fragments is developed with the potential for applying in the fragment-based lead generation scenario. The state-of-the-art transformer architecture was employed to learn the linker grammar and generate novel linker. Our results show that, given starting fragments and user customized linker constraints, our AutoLinker model can design abundant drug-like molecules fulfilling these constraints and its performance was superior to other reference models. Moreover, several examples were showcased that AutoLinker can be useful tools for carrying out drug design tasks such as fragment linking, lead optimization and scaffold hopping.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (32) ◽  
pp. 3829-3841 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshmanan Loganathan ◽  
Karthikeyan Muthusamy

Worldwide, colorectal cancer takes up the third position in commonly detected cancer and fourth in cancer mortality. Recent progress in molecular modeling studies has led to significant success in drug discovery using structure and ligand-based methods. This study highlights aspects of the anticancer drug design. The structure and ligand-based drug design are discussed to investigate the molecular and quantum mechanics in anti-cancer drugs. Recent advances in anticancer agent identification driven by structural and molecular insights are presented. As a result, the recent advances in the field and the current scenario in drug designing of cancer drugs are discussed. This review provides information on how cancer drugs were formulated and identified using computational power by the drug discovery society.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. 701-717 ◽  
Author(s):  
Izabella Pena Neshich ◽  
Leticia Nishimura ◽  
Fabio de Moraes ◽  
Jose Salim ◽  
Fabian Villalta-Romero ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (19) ◽  
pp. 1651-1660
Author(s):  
Anuraj Nayarisseri

Drug discovery is one of the most complicated processes and establishment of a single drug may require multidisciplinary attempts to design efficient and commercially viable drugs. The main purpose of drug design is to identify a chemical compound or inhibitor that can bind to an active site of a specific cavity on a target protein. The traditional drug design methods involved various experimental based approaches including random screening of chemicals found in nature or can be synthesized directly in chemical laboratories. Except for the long cycle design and time, high cost is also the major issue of concern. Modernized computer-based algorithm including structure-based drug design has accelerated the drug design and discovery process adequately. Surprisingly from the past decade remarkable progress has been made concerned with all area of drug design and discovery. CADD (Computer Aided Drug Designing) based tools shorten the conventional cycle size and also generate chemically more stable and worthy compounds and hence reduce the drug discovery cost. This special edition of editorial comprises the combination of seven research and review articles set emphasis especially on the computational approaches along with the experimental approaches using a chemical synthesizing for the binding affinity in chemical biology and discovery as a salient used in de-novo drug designing. This set of articles exfoliates the role that systems biology and the evaluation of ligand affinity in drug design and discovery for the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Dutkiewicz

AbstractDrug design is an expensive and time-consuming process. Any method that allows reducing the time the costs of the drug development project can have great practical value for the pharmaceutical industry. In structure-based drug design, affinity prediction methods are of great importance. The majority of methods used to predict binding free energy in protein-ligand complexes use molecular mechanics methods. However, many limitations of these methods in describing interactions exist. An attempt to go beyond these limits is the application of quantum-mechanical description for all or only part of the analyzed system. However, the extensive use of quantum mechanical (QM) approaches in drug discovery is still a demanding challenge. This chapter briefly reviews selected methods used to calculate protein-ligand binding affinity applied in virtual screening (VS), rescoring of docked poses, and lead optimization stage, including QM methods based on molecular simulations.


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