Is phenotypic fragment screening worthwhile?

Fragment-based drug discovery is almost always target-based. Indeed, not until the development of powerful biophysical techniques such as protein-labeled NMR did FBLD really began in earnest. Phenotypic fragment screens against cells, tissues, or animals are uncommon. In an open-access Front. Pharmacol. paper, Chris Lipinski and Andrew Reaume (Melior Discovery) argue that they should be used more often.

 

The researchers analyzed all 184,139,678 compounds in the CAS registry with molecular weights between 100 and 999 Da. These were divided into 18 bins (100-149 Da, 150-199 Da, etc.) Next, they calculated the percentage of molecules within each bin with any biological data as evidenced by the “biological study” tag in SciFinder-n.

 

In terms of raw numbers, fragments are well-represented, with the 250-299 Da bin containing close to 40 million molecules. However, only about 4% of these had any biological data. Molecules with molecular weights between 300 and 549 were abundant and also had considerably more biological data – up to roughly 50% of compounds in the 500-549 Da bin. In other words, people don’t seem to be screening lower molecular weight compounds in biological assays as often as they are screening larger molecules.

 

The assumption may be that small fragments are not biologically active, but the researchers revisit a classic In the Pipeline post in which Derek Lowe lists 56 drugs with molecular weights equal to or less than that of aspirin (180 Da). Most of these are old drugs, with all but three first reported in the chemical literature before 1980.

 

The researchers suggest that more effort should go into exploring the biology of smaller molecules, particularly those for which some activity is already reported. They also draw an interesting distinction between two uses of the word pleiotropic. People often say that a drug has pleiotropic effects if it acts on multiple targets; a classic example is imatinib, which hits several kinases in addition to the target BCR-ABL. However, the term pleiotropic originates in genetics and initially referred to one gene having multiple effects. Thus, a drug that acts on a single protein can have multiple effects, as in the case of the PDE5 inhibitor sildenafil.

 

As an example of a pleiotropic fragment, the researchers discuss MLR-1023, a fragment-sized molecule first discovered in a phenotypic screen at Pfizer in the 1970s. The molecule has shown promise in disease models ranging from atherosclerosis to myeloproliferative neoplasms and was taken into the clinic by Melior in 2014 as an anti-diabetic agent. All of these varied effects seem to stem from the ability of the compound to act as an activator of Lyn kinase. With just 15 non-hydrogen atoms and a molecular weight of 202 Da MLR-1023 is comfortably within rule of three space. Despite its small size, the molecule is a potent activator of Lyn, with an EC₅₀ around 50 nM, giving it a ligand efficiency of 0.66 kcal/mol per heavy atom.

 

Is MLR-1023 an outlier or an example of an underexplored pool of pharmacological riches? My suspicion is the former. It is rare to find fragments with EC₅₀s < 1 µM, let alone < 100 nM. Moreover, I suspect that many proteins are so difficult to drug that a molecule will need to be well beyond fragment-space – and even rule-of-five space – to have an effect. The protein-protein interaction targeted by venetoclax (MW = 868 Da) immediately comes to mind.

 

That said, the idea that a large group of tiny molecules is underexploited is worth exploring. For some types of drugs perhaps we don’t need extreme potency: Mike Hann noted a decade ago that the EC₅₀ values of approved drugs average 20-200 nM and cautioned against an “addiction to potency.” And because fragments are likely to have low affinities towards most proteins, they may even be more specific than larger drugs. It will be fun to discover how much room there really is at the bottom.