A novel multi-target drug screening strategy directed against key proteins of DAPk family.

Screening and identifying multi-target ligands becomes a daunting task when there are very few matching pharmacophoric features among the proteins. Herein, we describe a novel screening strategy to identify multi-target ligands for proteins having varying pharmacophoric features with their ligands. This strategy was adopted to identify multi-target ligands for death-associated protein kinase (DAPk) family. The role of the kinase activity of DAPk in eukaryotic cell apoptosis and the ability of bioavailable DAPk inhibitors to rescue neuronal death after brain injury have made it a drug-discovery target for neurodegenerative disorders. In this work, we employed a novel strategy using the existing computational approaches to design multi-target inhibitors, which can potentially inhibit one or any combination of the three DAPk family members. The strategy employs a combination of merged pharmacophore matching, database screening and molecular docking to reliably identify potential multi-target inhibitors targeted against DAPk protein family.

Computational identification of novel histone deacetylase inhibitors by docking based QSAR.

Histone deacetylases (HDACs) are enzymes that modify chromatin structure and contribute to aberrant gene expression in cancer. A series compounds with well-assigned HDAC inhibitory activity was used for docking based 3D-QSAR analysis. The 3D-QSAR acquired had excellent correlation coefficient value (q2=0.753) and high Fisher ratio (F=300.2). A validated pharmacophore model (AAAPR) was employed for virtual screening. After manual selection, molecular docking and further refinement, six compounds with good absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties were selected as potential HDAC inhibitors. Further, the molecular interactions of these inhibitors with the HDAC active site residues were discussed in detail.