Using NMR to Develop New Allosteric and Allo-Network Drugs.

NMR is becoming an important tool for developing new allosteric and allo-network drugs that bind to allosteric sites on enzymes, partially inhibiting them and causing fewer side effects than drugs already developed that target active sites. This is based on systems thinking, in which active enzymes and other proteins are known to be flexible and interact with each other. In other words, proteins can exist in an ensemble of different conformations whose populations are tunable. NMR is being used to find the pathways through which the effects of binding of an allosteric ligand propagate. There are NMR screening assays for studying ligand binding. This includes determining the changes in the spin lattice relaxation due to changes in the mobility of atoms involved in the binding, measuring magnetization transfer from the protein to the ligand by saturation difference transfer NMR (STD-NMR) and the transfer of bulk magnetization to the ligand by water-Ligand Observed via Gradient Spectroscopy, or waterLOGSY. The chemical shifts of (1)H and (15)N of some of the atoms in amino acids change when an allosteric ligand binds to a protein. So, (1)H-(15)N heteronuclear single quantum coherence (HSQC) spectra can be used to identify key amino acids and ligand binding sites. The NMR chemical shifts of amino acids affected by ligand binding form a network that can be characterized. Allosteric networks can be identified by chemical shift covariance analysis (CHESCA). This approach has been used recently to study the binding of new molecular entities (NMEs) to potentially therapeutic drug targets.