Direct Measurement of Intracellular Compound Concentration by RapidFire Mass Spectrometry Offers Insights into Cell Permeability.

One of the key challenges facing early stage drug discovery is understanding the commonly observed difference between the activity of compounds in biochemical assays and cellular assays. Traditionally, indirect or estimated cell permeability measurements such as estimations from logP or artificial membrane permeability are used to explain the differences. The missing link is a direct measurement of intracellular compound concentration in whole cells. This can, in some circumstances, be estimated from the cellular activity, but this may also be problematic if cellular activity is weak or absent. Advances in sensitivity and throughput of analytical techniques have enabled us to develop a high-throughput assay for the measurement of intracellular compound concentration for routine use to support lead optimization. The assay uses a RapidFire-MS based readout of compound concentration in HeLa cells following incubation of cells with test compound. The initial assay validation was performed by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, and the assay was subsequently transferred to RapidFire tandem mass spectrometry. Further miniaturization and optimization were performed to streamline the process, increase sample throughput, and reduce cycle time. This optimization has delivered a semi-automated platform with the potential of production scale compound profiling up to 100 compounds per day.

Antagonism of human CC-chemokine receptor 4 can be achieved through three distinct binding sites on the receptor.

Chemokine receptor antagonists appear to access two distinct binding sites on different members of this receptor family. One class of CCR4 antagonists has been suggested to bind to a site accessible from the cytoplasm while a second class did not bind to this site. In this report, we demonstrate that antagonists representing a variety of structural classes bind to two distinct allosteric sites on CCR4. The effects of pairs of low-molecular weight and/or chemokine CCR4 antagonists were evaluated on CCL17- and CCL22-induced responses of human CCR4(+) T cells. This provided an initial grouping of the antagonists into sets which appeared to bind to distinct binding sites. Binding studies were then performed with radioligands from each set to confirm these groupings. Some novel receptor theory was developed to allow the interpretation of the effects of the antagonist combinations. The theory indicates that, generally, the concentration-ratio of a pair of competing allosteric modulators is maximally the sum of their individual effects while that of two modulators acting at different sites is likely to be greater than their sum. The low-molecular weight antagonists could be grouped into two sets on the basis of the functional and binding experiments. The antagonistic chemokines formed a third set whose behaviour was consistent with that of simple competitive antagonists. These studies indicate that there are two allosteric regulatory sites on CCR4.