Prioritization of active antimalarials using structural interaction profile of Plasmodium falciparum enoyl-acyl carrier protein reductase (PfENR)-triclosan derivatives.

An empirical relationship between the experimental inhibitory activities of triclosan derivatives and its computationally predicted Plasmodium falciparum enoyl-acyl carrier protein (ACP) reductase (PfENR) dock poses was developed to model activities of known antimalarials. A statistical model was developed using 57 triclosan derivatives with significant measures (r = 0.849, q(2) = 0.619, s = 0.481) and applied on structurally related and structurally diverse external datasets. A substructure-based search on ChEMBL malaria dataset (280 compounds) yielded only two molecules with significant docking energy, whereas eight active antimalarials (EC(50) < 100 nM, tested on 3D7 strain) with better predicted activities (pIC(50) ~ 7) from Open Access Malaria Box (400 compounds) were prioritized. Further, calculations on the structurally diverse rhodanine molecules (known PfENR inhibitors) distinguished actives (experimental IC(50) = 0.035 μM; predicted pIC(50) = 6.568) and inactives (experimental IC(50) = 50 μM; predicted pIC50 = -4.078), which showed that antimalarials possessing dock poses similar to experimental interaction profiles can be used as leads to test experimentally on enzyme assays.