Molecules special issue: Developments in Fragment-Based Lead Discovery

Last December the first-ever Pacifichem symposium on FBLD was held in Honolulu. Two of the organizers, Martin Scanlon and Ray Norton, invited participants to submit manuscripts to a special issue of Molecules, which has now published.

The collection starts with a very brief Foreword by me describing the Symposium itself. The first actual paper, from Qingwen Zhang and collaborators at the Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Industry, WuXi AppTec, and China Pharmaceutical University, focuses on kinase inhibitors. The researchers examine fragment-sized substructures of 15 approved drugs that inhibit kinases and use these to design a high-nanomolar inhibitor of the V600E mutant form of BRAF, which modeling suggests should bind to the protein in the “DFG-out” conformation.

Next comes a fragment-finding paper from Thomas Leeper and collaborators at the University of Akron and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The researchers were interested in finding inhibitors of the glutaredoxin protein (GRX) from the pathogen Brucella melitensis, which causes brucellosis. An STD NMR screen of 463 fragments (each at 0.5 mM in pools of 5-7) resulted in 84 hits, though 75 also hit human GRX. Subsequent experiments including chemical shift perturbation and modeling identified a mM binder with modest selectivity over the human enzyme. Next, the researchers introduced several covalent warheads (including a rather exotic ruthenium analog), one of which led to improved affinity, though the stoichiometry was not determined.

The remaining papers are all reviews, starting with one on native mass spectrometry (MS) by Liliana Pedro and Ronald Quinn at Griffith University. This provides a good historical, theoretical, and practical overview of the technique generally, as well as various applications for fragment-screening. It also covers most of the published examples and discusses both the strengths (such as speed and low protein consumption) as well as the weaknesses (false positives and false negatives) of native MS.

NMR is up next, with a paper by Pacifichem organizer Ke Ruan and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei. This provides a concise but detailed description of library design, ligand- and protein-detected fragment screening, structural model generation, and hit to lead optimization.

Protein-directed dynamic combinatorial chemistry (DCC) is tackled by Renjie Huang and Ivanhoe Leung, both at the University of Auckland. In addition to summarizing the theory and various literature examples, the authors do an excellent job covering the pros and cons of different types of chemistries and analytical techniques.

Next comes a review by Begoña Heras and collaborators at La Trobe University and Monash University on the subject of bacterial Dsb proteins, which are essential for disulfide bond formation in virulence factors. The review covers the biology as well as several approaches to finding inhibitors, some of which we’ve previously covered (here and here). There is much more to do: as the researchers conclude, “the development of Dsb inhibitors is still in its infancy.”

Finally, Ray Norton and colleagues at Monash University discuss applications of ¹⁹F NMR for fragment-based lead discovery. In addition to covering fluorine-containing fragments, the researchers also discuss using fluorine-containing probe molecules and – even more unusual – fluorine-labeled proteins, in this case using 5-fluorotryptophan. The paper includes previously unpublished results on how these latter two approaches can be used to understand protein-ligand interactions.

One nice feature of this journal is that it is open-access, so if you are lucky enough to be back in Hawaii this December you can pull up the papers on your smartphone while lying on the beach.