Pharmacophore Modelling and Virtual Screening Studies for the Discovery of Potential Natural Products Based PDE1B Inhibitor Lead Compounds

Author(s):  
Teng Woei Shy ◽  
Anand Gaurav

Aim: The aim of the present study was to apply pharmacophore based virtual screening to a natural product database to identify potential PDE1B inhibitor lead compounds for neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. Background: Neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders are a major health burden globally. The existing therapies do not provide optimal relief and are associated with substantial adverse effects. This has resulted in a huge unmet medical need for newer and more effective therapies for these disorders. Phosphodiesterase (PDEs) enzymes have been identified as potential targets of drugs for neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders, and one of the subtypes, i.e., PDE1B, accounts for more than 90 % of total brain PDE activity associated with learning and memory process, making it an interesting drug target for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders. Objectives: The present study has been conducted to identify potential PDE1B inhibitor lead compounds from the natural product database. Methods: Ligand-based pharmacophore models were generated and validated; they were then employed for virtual screening of Universal Natural Products Database (UNPD) followed by docking with PDE1B to identify the best hit compound. Results: Virtual screening led to the identification of 85 compounds which were then docked into the active site of PDE1B. Out of the 85 compounds, six showed a higher affinity for PDE1B than the standard PDE1B inhibitors. The top scoring compound was identified as Cedreprenone. Conclusion: Virtual screening of UNPD using Ligand based pharmacophore led to the identification of Cedreprenone, a potential new natural PDE1B inhibitor lead compound.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan J. Mills ◽  
Kaylib R. Robinson ◽  
Troy E. Zehnder ◽  
Joshua G. Pierce

The lipoxazolidinone family of marine natural products, with an unusual 4-oxazolidinone heterocycle at their core, represents a new scaffold for antimicrobial discovery; however, questions regarding their mechanism of action and high lipophilicity have likely slowed follow-up studies. Herein, we report the first synthesis of lipoxazolidinone A, 15 structural analogs to explore its active pharmacophore, and initial resistance and mechanism of action studies. These results suggest that 4-oxazolidinones are valuable scaffolds for antimicrobial development and reveal simplified lead compounds for further optimization.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 588-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmoud A. Al-Sha'er ◽  
Rua'a A. Al-Aqtash ◽  
Mutasem O. Taha

<P>Background: PI3K&#948; is predominantly expressed in hematopoietic cells and participates in the activation of leukocytes. PI3K&#948; inhibition is a promising approach for treating inflammatory diseases and leukocyte malignancies. Accordingly, we decided to model PI3K&#948; binding. </P><P> Methods: Seventeen PI3K&#948; crystallographic complexes were used to extract 94 pharmacophore models. QSAR modelling was subsequently used to select the superior pharmacophore(s) that best explain bioactivity variation within a list of 79 diverse inhibitors (i.e., upon combination with other physicochemical descriptors). </P><P> Results: The best QSAR model (r2 = 0.71, r2 LOO = 0.70, r2 press against external testing list of 15 compounds = 0.80) included a single crystallographic pharmacophore of optimal explanatory qualities. The resulting pharmacophore and QSAR model were used to screen the National Cancer Institute (NCI) database for new PI3Kδ inhibitors. Two hits showed low micromolar IC50 values. </P><P> Conclusion: Crystallography-based pharmacophores were successfully combined with QSAR analysis for the identification of novel PI3K&#948; inhibitors.</P>


Marine Drugs ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (8) ◽  
pp. 443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaden Cowan ◽  
Mohammad Shadab ◽  
Dwayaja H. Nadkarni ◽  
Kailash KC ◽  
Sadanandan E. Velu ◽  
...  

Non-melanoma skin cancer is one of the major ailments in the United States. Effective drugs that can cure skin cancers are limited. Moreover, the available drugs have toxic side effects. Therefore, skin cancer drugs with less toxic side effects are urgently needed. To achieve this goal, we focused our work on identifying potent lead compounds from marine natural products. Five lead compounds identified from a class of pyrroloiminoquinone natural products were evaluated for their ability to selectively kill squamous cell carcinoma (SCC13) skin cancer cells using an MTT assay. The toxicity of these compounds was also evaluated against the normal human keratinocyte HaCaT cell line. The most potent compound identified from these studies, C278 was further evaluated for its ability to inhibit cancer cell migration and invasion using a wound-healing assay and a trans-well migration assay, respectively. To investigate the molecular mechanism of cell death, the expression of apoptotic and autophagy proteins was studied in C278 treated cells compared to untreated cells using western blot. Our results showed that all five compounds effectively killed the SCC13 cells, with compound C278 being the most effective. Compound C278 was more effective in killing the SCC13 cells compared to HaCaT cells with a two-fold selectivity. The migration and the invasion of the SCC13 cells were also inhibited upon treatment with compound C278. The expression of pro-apoptotic and autophagy proteins with concomitant downregulation in the expression of survival proteins were observed in C278 treated cells. In summary, the marine natural product analog compound C278 showed promising anticancer activity against human skin cancer cells and holds potential to be developed as an effective anticancer agent to combat skin cancer.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Koulouridi ◽  
Marilia Valli ◽  
Fidele Ntie-Kang ◽  
Vanderlan da Silva Bolzani

Abstract Databases play an important role in various computational techniques, including virtual screening (VS) and molecular modeling in general. These collections of molecules can contain a large amount of information, making them suitable for several drug discovery applications. For example, vendor, bioactivity data or target type can be found when searching a database. The introduction of these data resources and their characteristics is used for the design of an experiment. The description of the construction of a database can also be a good advisor for the creation of a new one. There are free available databases and commercial virtual libraries of molecules. Furthermore, a computational chemist can find databases for a general purpose or a specific subset such as natural products (NPs). In this chapter, NP database resources are presented, along with some guidelines when preparing an NP database for drug discovery purposes.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dibakar Goswami ◽  
Mukesh Kumar ◽  
Sunil K. Ghosh ◽  
Amit Das

SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 has caused more than 10,00,000 infections and ~55,000 deaths worldwide spanning over 203 countries, and the numbers are exponentially increasing. Due to urgent need of treating the SARS infection, many approved, pre-clinical, anti-viral, anti-malarial and anti-SARS drugs are being administered to patients. SARS-CoV-2 papain-like protease (PLpro) has a protease domain which cleaves the viral polyproteins a/b, necessary for its survival and replication, and is one of the drug target against SARS-CoV-2. 3D structures of SARS-CoV-2 PLpro were built by homology modelling. Two models having partially open and closed conformations were used in our study. Virtual screening of natural product compounds was performed. We prepared an in house library of compounds found in rhizomes, Alpinia officinarum, ginger and curcuma, and docked them into the solvent accessible S3-S4 pocket of PLpro. Eight compounds from Alpinia officinarum and ginger bind with high in silico affinity to closed PLpro conformer, and hence are potential SARS-CoV-2 PLpro inhibitors. Our study reveal new lead compounds targeting SARS-CoV-2. Further structure based modifications or extract formulations of these compounds can lead to highly potent inhibitors to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections.<br>


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (35) ◽  
pp. 6372-6390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saumitra Sengupta ◽  
Goverdhan Mehta

Natural product modulators of the cAMP pathway have been evaluated and their total synthesis campaign is described in detail.


Author(s):  
Dibakar Goswami ◽  
Mukesh Kumar ◽  
Sunil K. Ghosh ◽  
Amit Das

SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 has caused more than 10,00,000 infections and ~55,000 deaths worldwide spanning over 203 countries, and the numbers are exponentially increasing. Due to urgent need of treating the SARS infection, many approved, pre-clinical, anti-viral, anti-malarial and anti-SARS drugs are being administered to patients. SARS-CoV-2 papain-like protease (PLpro) has a protease domain which cleaves the viral polyproteins a/b, necessary for its survival and replication, and is one of the drug target against SARS-CoV-2. 3D structures of SARS-CoV-2 PLpro were built by homology modelling. Two models having partially open and closed conformations were used in our study. Virtual screening of natural product compounds was performed. We prepared an in house library of compounds found in rhizomes, Alpinia officinarum, ginger and curcuma, and docked them into the solvent accessible S3-S4 pocket of PLpro. Eight compounds from Alpinia officinarum and ginger bind with high in silico affinity to closed PLpro conformer, and hence are potential SARS-CoV-2 PLpro inhibitors. Our study reveal new lead compounds targeting SARS-CoV-2. Further structure based modifications or extract formulations of these compounds can lead to highly potent inhibitors to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections.<br>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janosch Menke ◽  
Joana Massa ◽  
Oliver Koch

<div>Due to its desirable properties, natural products are an important ligand class for medicinal chemists. However, due to their structural distinctiveness, traditional cheminformatic approaches, like ligand-based virtual screening, often perform worse for natural products. Based on our recent work, we evaluated the ability of neural networks to generate fingerprints more appropriate for the use with natural products. A manually curated dataset of natural products and synthetic decoys was used to train a multi-layer perceptron network and an autoencoder-like network. An in-depth analysis showed that the extracted natural product specific neural fingerprints outperforms traditional as well as natural product specific fingerprints on three datasets. Further, we explore how the activation from the output layer of a network can work as a novel natural product likeness score. Overall two natural product specific datasets were generated, which are publicly available together with the code to create the fingerprints and the novel natural product likeness score.<br></div>


Coronaviruses ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 02 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Patricia Adisurja ◽  
Arli Aditya Parkesit

: As per the1st of September 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has reached an unprecedented level of more than 25 million cases with more than 850,000 deaths. Moreover, all the drug candidates are still undergoing testing in clinical trial. In this regard, a breakthrough in drug design is necessary. One strategy to devise lead compounds is leveraging natural products as a lead source. Several companies and research institutes are currently developing anti-SARS-CoV-2 leads from natural products. Flavanoids are well known as a class of antiviral compounds library. The objective of this research is to employ virtual screening methods for obtaining the best lead compounds from the library of flavonoid compounds. This research employed virtual screening methods that comprised of downloading the protein and lead compound structures, QSAR analysis prediction, iterations of molecular docking simulation, and ADME-TOX simulation for toxicity prediction. The QSAR analysis found that the tested compounds have broad-spectrum antiviral activity, and some of them exhibit specific binding to the 3C-like Protease of the Coronavirus. Moreover, juglanin was found as the compound with the most fit binding with the Protease enzyme of SARS-CoV-2. Although most of the tested compounds are deemed toxic by the ADME-Tox test, further research should be conducted to comprehend the most feasible strategy to deliver the drug to the infected lung cells. The juglanin compound is selected as the most fit candidate as the SARS-CoV-2 lead compound in the tested flavonoid samples. However, further research should be conducted to observe the lead delivery method to the cell.


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